LawArXiv was launched in 2017 to provide legal scholars with an open-access, non-profit platform for preserving their work. By the end of the first year, over 700 articles had been submitted to the archive and there were plans for additional features to make the repository more robust and useful to the legal scholarly community. However, those plans never made it to fruition. Earlier this year, it was announced that LawArXiv would no longer accept new submissions.
At the recent Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) annual meeting, more details were shared about why the LawArXiv project was shutting down. At the heart of the matter were irreconcilable issues with the Center for Open Science (COS), which hosts the LawArXiv platform as well as open-access platforms for a number of other areas of study. Due to insufficient demand from their other partners, COS was unable to support the development of new platform features, including school-level branding and batch uploading, requested by the LawArXiv Steering Committee. The Steering Committee was given the option of financing the development of these features but that option was cost-prohibitive. Further stressing the agreement was the fact that COS had also instituted a new annual hosting fee in January, 2021. The Steering Committee was left questioning whether it was worth paying the annual hosting fee knowing that features crucial to the growth of LawArXiv were not slated for development.
These issues proved to
be deal breakers for the project. After extensive research and discussion of
various options, the LawArXiv Steering Committee ultimately decided to end the
partnership with COS. The agreement among the member institutions was formally
dissolved on June 30, 2021. While LawArVix is no longer accepting new
submissions, the 1,382 articles previously uploaded to the site are still available for
the time being on COS’s general preprints platform.
