Scholarship Repository: Open Access 24/7

Today marks the end of the sixth annual Open Access Week, an international effort to promote free access to scholarly research. Previous years' events and initiatives are detailed in past Blogson entries.

This year, we'd like to highlight an ongoing effort at Duke Law School, which illustrates our commitment to open access: The Duke Law Scholarship Repository. Since 1998, Duke's student-edited journals have been freely accessible on the Duke Law website. The Faculty Scholarship Repository was launched in 2005 to provide broader access to the research of our faculty and affiliates. Today, the Repository houses both the long-running Faculty Scholarship collection as well as the complete back files of Duke Law's nine student-edited journals, which were added to the repository over the last year. Both our collection and audience continue to grow steadily; in mid-September, Duke became the first law school repository to reach 1.5 million downloads.

For a glimpse behind the scenes at the repository work, check out Scholarship Snippets, a daily micro-blog of statistics and other repository usage information which debuted earlier this fall. Each entry describes fun facts like the all-time top download for a particular Duke Law journal, which devices and browsers our readers are using, and how visitors find their way into our repository. The blog is maintained by Digital Initiatives Librarian Hollie White, who also coordinates the Repository. The new Snippets blog, the Faculty collection and the Journals collection are all accessible from the Goodson Law Library home page, under the "Scholarship Repository" heading.

The Repository will continue to post the latest works by Duke Law faculty and new journal issues, and several historical Law School collections are also being prepared for inclusion. Users can subscribe to the latest updates via RSS, for the entire repository or for customized searches (such as a particular author). For questions about the Repository, please contact Digital Initiatives Librarian Hollie White.