Scholarship - Consolidating and Leveraging Law Faculty Scholarship

Emory Law Scholarly Commons (ELSC) is Emory Law's digital institutional repository. Currently, ELSC houses journal articles published by the five Emory Law journals, legal scholarship produced by Emory Law faculty, and research and scholarship curated by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion.  By including your scholarship in ELSC, you work becomes openly and freely available to others, which increases the impact of your work, benefits the public, boosts your author profile, and aligns with Emory University's Open Access Policy. 

ELSC is not a replacement for social media accounts, personal blogs and websites, or other channels that you should continue to use to rapidly disseminate information about your work to a broad audience. 

Including your scholarship in the Emory Law Scholarly Commons repository

• Ensures that your work will be permanently accessible (some commercial sites may remove (without notice) articles that you are not authorized to post),
• Ensures that users who conduct Google searches, Google Scholar searches, and searches using other search engines are more likely to find your work due to ELSC SEO enhancements, and 
• Will not reduce the number of downloads of your work from other sites - in fact, making your work more visible and more widely available ensures that a greater number of people have access to it, with downloads continuing over a longer period of time.

If you are an Emory Law faculty member, and you would like to have your legal scholarship added to ELSC, please contact Andrea Quinn: andrea.quinn@emory.edu

Getting Your Work Added to ELSC

Before the MacMillan Law Library can post any published law journal articles to our repository, we are required to ensure that Emory Law has permission to post each individual work. Authoring a law article confers copyrights to the author, but publisher agreements may limit rights to distribute, reproduce, or otherwise use a work.

Publisher agreements vary somewhat, but such agreements may include:

• an embargo that specifies your work cannot be posted to a repository for a year or some other period of time after the work is first published
• terms that limit where you can post your article -- in some cases, authors are not allowed to post their works to non-commercial institutional repositories
• terms that specify what copyright or publication information must be included with your article if it is posted to a repository
• terms about the format of the article that can be posted to a repository -- in some cases, publishers will only allow versions other than the final, published (formatted) version to be posted to a repository
• a requirement that you seek and receive written approval from the publisher or your co-authors to post an article to a repository
• restrictions on posting an article to a commercial repository

Before you Sign a Publisher Agreement

Because some publisher agreements restrict when, how, or if you are allowed to have your work posted to an institutional repository, it can be useful to review the terms of your agreement before you sign to determine if you'll be able to add your work to ELSC. At times, it may be possible to propose modifications to agreements that allow you to post to ELSC:

• Review the terms of your agreement to ensure that you will be able to post your article to a non-commercial, institutional repository as close in time as possible to when your article is published.
• Ensure that you will be able to post the final, formatted, pdf version of your article to ELSC.
• If disseminating your work through ELSC is important to you, try to work with publishers that promote Open Access policies, that do not charge fees to have works republished, and that do not limit options for authors to post and distribute their work.