The roundtable session on faculty repositories opened with participants introducing themselves and commenting on what brought them to the discussion. Most were involved in their institution’s current or planned program to provide some level of repository service and wanted to gain insight from colleagues. Below is a summary of the discussion.
There were approximately 14 participants, including the facilitator, Donna Nixon. When asked what system their institutions were using, about 6 had home-grown systems. Others relied on BE-Press’s Digital Commons, SSRN, NELLCO, E-Pub, or a university or consortium repository system such as the California Digital Library’s system. Some used a combination of two or more systems. Those who chose not to use BE-Press cited the high start-up and maintenance costs (quoted at ~$15,000 to start and several thousand each year) or the limited ability to customize the product or own the content.
Most participants indicated that they already had in place some repository system. Some defined repository broadly and considered compiled bibliographic lists of faculty scholarship to be repositories. Others had bibliographies that were linked to full-text via HeinOnline, LexisNexis, SSRN, and Westlaw and considered those repositories. At the top level, many had or were planning publically available searchable databases with full-text articles, book chapters and other scholarship.
Some institutions also define repository-worthy scholarship broadly and include newspaper articles, blog postings, CLE presentations, radio and television appearances and multimedia presentations by faculty. However, most institutions restrict the type of material included in their repositories, either because of limited resources to find, track or store that wide a variety of material or because of a stricter view of what qualifies as scholarship. Often decisions on what to include were made in collaboration with the law school dean, communication person, or dean for faculty scholarship. Generally, repositories do include scholarly “working papers” or not-yet-published scholarly articles.
The overwhelming majority of participants said that the library was the entity within their law schools to initiate and maintain repositories, although some did that in conjunction with their law school’s communications and/or IT departments. One library inherited the repository from its law school IT department.
Another question concerned whose scholarship qualified for the repository. Most excluded adjuncts unless the adjunct was a notable figure. Generally the repositories included current full-time faculty, retired and emeritus faculty, and items by former faculty written prior to and during the time they were on faculty at the institution. Most stopped gathering items for faculty once the faculty left to go to other schools. Additionally, some schools include in the repository other law school material, including student writings, CLE material and law school video presentations.
For some schools participation in the repository is mandatory for current faculty. For others it is voluntary. Some participants had difficulty collecting repository material or information from faculty or getting faculty to update that information. Many sent periodic reminders to faculty. Some also had mechanisms, either through the law school dean, the dean for faculty scholarship, the communications officer or others that strongly encouraged faculty to submit their scholarship to the repository. The incentive of having one’s work discoverable by multiple channels often helped minimize this issue. In some schools, the library had research assistants work to gather scholarship information and materials for the repository or had the information forwarded from the faculty administrative assistant.
Concerning whether and how most obtained permissions to include material, it ran the gamut. Some schools just posted items and assumed that was okay. Others have gotten permission from HeinOnline and SSRN to include or post (with attribution). Still others mount an aggressive effort to get permissions and will not include items until they do. Many assumed that if the faculty-member provided the content, then they had permission. At least one participant advocated for the library pro-actively educating faculty about copyright and scholarly communication and encouraging faculty to negotiate licenses with publishers that allow their institutions to include their material in an open-access repository.
When the discussion turned to SSRN some expressed frustration at being asked by faculty to post to SSRN articles from 15 or 20 years ago. There may be copyright issues with doing that. Also, some participants believed that SSRN is meant for working papers, but SSRN has now evolved from that narrow focus and others reported posting old articles and found it beneficial for their faculty. One participant pointed out that getting permissions from law reviews to post the old articles is generally easy since law reviews are in business to get scholarship disseminated, not to make money. With SSRN if a faculty-member is trying to get a paper published in a journal and that journal has a rule against authors pre-publishing the article, libraries have refrained from posting or have asked the journals to wave that rule. At least some journals have no objection to pre-posting on SSRN, despite their written rules to the contrary.
For further information, interested librarians are encouraged to contact Ken Hirsh, Director of the Law Library and Information Technology at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, who has started an informal AALL repository interest group.