The outstanding scholarship of faculty at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago has been downloaded more than 3,000 times since it was made available through the new John Marshall institutional repository, hosted on the Digital Commons platform.
Under the direction of Ramsey Donnell and Raizel Liebler, librarians in John Marshall’s Louis L. Biro Law Library, the repository went online in April 2013. Materials can be accessed at https://repository.jmls.edu/
More than 350 John Marshall faculty articles published in law journals across the country are available in PDF form through the institutional repository hosted by bepress (Berkeley Electronic Press). While most articles are available for full-text download, others have citation information for easier access.
Today, Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is an immediate way to search for faculty scholarship, but Donnell said the repository will give John Marshall faculty pieces a longer life because the works can be more readily found using Internet searches.
“Digital Commons delivers to a different audience, although it will work in tandem with SSRN, which is best at disseminating recent scholarship within a discipline. Digital Commons provides works to an interdisciplinary audience, and gives researchers the opportunity to find older scholarship using web searches,” Donnell said.
The idea for a repository was first discussed in June 2012 with Associate Dean Ralph Ruebner; Teresa Do, director of Administrative Support for Faculty; and June Liebert, chief information officer. The idea then was presented by Donnell and Liebler to various faculty committees. Once the project was approved, the library subscribed to Digital Commons. Faculty articles were identified and downloaded pursuant to an arrangement with a commercial scholarship aggregator, and appropriate permissions were secured from the publishers to upload the content to the repository.
The Digital Commons project is being expanded over the summer months to include landing pages for John Marshall’s journals and access to their archival issues. The John Marshall Law Review and the Journal of Information Technology and Privacy Law (formerly the Journal of Computer and Information Law), will provide online access with the Fall 2013 issues. The John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law has always been an online publication, and its archives too will be uploaded to the repository. The John Marshall journals will maintain their independent websites.
Together with those projects, Donnell and Liebler are working with faculty to expand the reach of faculty law review articles.
The “Top 10” most downloaded articles demonstrate the breadth of John Marshall faculty scholarship:
- Good but Not Great: Improving Access to Public Records under the D.C. Freedom of Information Act by Professor Margaret B. Kwoka and attorney Melissa Davenport
- Literature, and the Legacy of Virginia Woolf: Stories and Lessons in Feminist Legal Theory by Professor Susan L. Brody
- Chinese Patents as Copyrights by Professor Benjamin Liu
- A License to Deceive: Enforcing Contractual Myths Despite Consumer Psychological Realities by Professor Debra Pogrund Stark and Professor Jessica M. Choplin of DePaul University
- Games Are Not Coffee Mugs: Games and the Right of Publicity by Professor William K. Ford and Research Services Librarian Raizel Liebler
- Legal Writing, the Remix: Plagiarism and Hip Hop Ethics by Professor Kim D. Chanbonpin
- Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail by Professor David E. Sorkin
- Informed Consent: No Longer Just What the Doctor Ordered – The Contributions of Medical Associations and Courts to a More Patient Friendly Doctrine by Professor Marc D. Ginsberg
- Currency of Love: Customary International Law and the Battle for Same-Sex Marriage in the United States by Professor Sonia Bychkov Green
- We, the Judges: The Legalized Subject and Narratives of Adjudication in Reality Television by Professor Cynthia D. Bond
