About the Repository

The Penn Carey Law Institutional Repository is an initiative that is developed and maintained by the Biddle Law Library as part of a strategic goal to collect, organize, and amplify the scholarly output of the Penn Carey Law Community.

Purpose

  • Proactively serve and adapt to the ever-changing scholarly environment of Penn Carey Law School by implementing a singular institutional repository.
  • Build a centralized and unrestricted digital archive that increases the visibility, discoverability, and collaborative opportunities for Penn Carey Law’s scholarly output.
  • Ensure the long-term preservation and appropriate description of the scholarly material produced by Penn Carey Law and affiliated archives and special collections partners.

Guiding Principles

The following principles guide all content and operational decisions with respect to the repository:

  • Innovation – We strive to leverage new methods and technologies to expand our content and increase access to information.
  • Accessibility – Materials in the repository should be accessible to as many users as possible.
  • Openness – The repository should be as open as possible, removing all barriers to information access.
  • Equity – Repository collections should represent a wide range of voices and viewpoints with a dedication to reparative descriptive practices.
  • Collaboration – The repository should be a welcome environment that increases opportunities for collaboration.

Administration

  • Management / Personnel

    • This repository is a substantial piece of Biddle Law Library’s Intellectual Life initiative, which is under the supervision of the Associate Director for Scholarly Data and Innovation. Collections within the repository that relate to faculty scholarship and output are under the direct purview of the Scholarly Communications and Open Access Librarian. Penn Carey Law journal issues on the repository are posted and maintained by our library specialists and overseen by the Scholarly Communications and Open Access Librarian. Periodic contributions of archival content may be made by archives department staff.

  • Deposit of repository materials

    • Members of the Penn Carey Law community who wish to submit materials to be considered for inclusion in the repository should send these files along with descriptive metadata to facpubs@law.upenn.edu. Descriptive metadata includes all information that identifies the work, its authors, publication information, an abstract or summary, and descriptive keywords that will aid searchers in locating the work through search engines. Alternately, members of the Scholarly Communications and Impact Team may make direct contact with authors if we discover any works that should be included in the repository. The Scholarly Communications and Impact team reviews all submitted materials to ensure they comply with our criteria for inclusion, rights requirements, and preservations guidelines before adding them to the repository. Biddle Law Library may periodically engage in audits or reviews of repository collections to assess whether collections should be modified, removed, added, or expanded.

Content scope / Criteria for inclusion

The Penn Carey Law repository collects and presents materials that meet the following criteria:

  • Penn Carey Law affiliation — The material must be created by, produced by, or substantially feature one or more members of the Penn Carey Law community, such as:
    • scholarship authored by our faculty and/or students,
    • law journal issues that have been edited by students,
    • conference/symposium proceedings that have been organized or moderated by Penn Carey Law affiliates,
    • recorded interviews that feature Penn Carey Law affiliates as a host or a significant guest, and
    • materials produced by members of Biddle Law Library’s archives partner institutions.
  • Creative and Original Work — The material must include original work that can be attributed to Penn Carey Law affiliates.
  • Relevant to institutional mission — The materials must be consistent with and relevant to the scholarly and academic goals of Penn Carey Law (i.e., focused on the advancement of learning or scholarship in law or other relevant fields in which our faculty specialize).
  • Available in a user-consumable format — The materials must be in a format that can be easily viewed on the repository (i.e., PDFs, Streaming audio or video, JPG or TIFF images) or that can be downloaded and viewed by users without the use of specialty or expensive software. Due to bandwidth and storage considerations, we may avoid collecting files that are extremely large and difficult to download.
  • Of lasting institutional value — The materials should provide some long-lasting value to be included in the repository. Examples of valuable longevity include:
    • scholarly contribution,
    • historical or archival significance, and
    • preservation of Penn Carey Law intellectual life.
  • Published or vetted works — Materials posted to the repository must have been selected and edited for final publication, or alternatively gone through a process of selection and approval.
    • SSRN working papers that have not yet been published will not be added to the repository
    • Podcasts and event videos are considered “published” in this context.
  • Posted with permission — Materials will not be posted to the repository without the permission of the creators and rights-holders. In cases where rights are ambiguously held, materials will not be posted until we have a clear statement of permission to post.
  • Capable of Description — Materials must be accompanied with certain descriptive metadata fields that enable us to organize it and retrieve basic information that identifies the work, establishes authorship and provenance, and gives an indication of subject matter.

Author Rights / Copyright statement

When submitting to this repository, the author retains the copyright for their works. As such, we make efforts to ensure that publication agreements are followed and ask that authors hold copyright, have reserved their rights to post in an open access institutional repository, or have specific permission from the publisher. Permissions for many publishers can be found at SHERPA/RoMEO. We are able to provide landing pages with metadata that link out to publishers’ sites or post works with an embargo period, if necessary. We strongly recommend authors consider utilizing Creative Commons: Scholar's Copyright Agreement Engine for assistance in creating documentation to claim copyright on their works. If you have any questions or concerns about your rights as an author or what can be added to the institutional repository, please contact the librarians at facpubs@law.upenn.edu

Preservation

The Biddle Law Library is committed to preserving and providing access to all the contents in the repository. We use metadata schemas according to library best practices, which include adhering to standards, using common controlled vocabularies, and enabling automated crosswalks wherever possible. We strive for bit-level preservation and migration to the best of our abilities and the ability of our current institutional repository platform. The repository is considered a permanent archive. Content may be removed at the author’s request or at the discretion of the IR managers.

Platform

Our institutional repository is not tied to any specific software platform and may be migrated based on the needs of our scholarly community, the format of scholarly material, and improvements in institutional repository technology. In addition, we commit to using platforms with clear and responsive withdrawal policies that allow for the continued use, access, and preservation of our content.

Our current repository platform is Digital Commons, developed and maintained by Elsevier/BePress. The repository runs on servers that are the responsibility of Elsevier/BePress.

Statement about open access and IR documents

The primary goal of Penn Carey Law’s Legal Scholarship Repository is to provide free, permanent open access to the many variations of scholarly work of the law school. The institutional repository will include digital copies of faculty scholarship that is published in open access. We are also able to scan physical documents (old working papers, book chapters, etc) that do not have digital counterparts and upload them to the repository if it would not violate copyright. Works limited by copyright (including those in paywalled journals or books) may still have a page in the repository with a direct link to the original publication, rather than a downloadable PDF. In many cases we can post pre-prints or drafts of works, depending on publisher agreements.

Accessibility

Biddle Law Library endeavors to take reasonable steps to make repository content as accessible as possible. Audio/Visual content will be accompanied by text transcripts as they are available. Any transcripts created by computerized/AI services will be labeled as such. Most web accessibility aspects of the repository are under the control of our repository software provider, which is currently BePress. More information about BePress’ accessibility policies and procedures are available here: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/accessibility.html

User Data Privacy

The Biddle Law Library strives to protect the privacy of our users and contributors in the following ways:

  • Repository materials will be reviewed to ensure that no Personal Identifying Information (PII) or confidential information is archived or made public.
  • Authors of repository materials are identified only by their names and institutional email addresses, if available.

Digital Commons does track and aggregate some aspects of user behavior when visiting the repository. Examples of tracked behavior are:

  • Your IP address and any institutions affiliated with that address.
  • Browser/operating system.
  • Pages viewed on the repository.
  • Items downloaded from the repository.

More information on Digital Commons privacy practices and procedures is available at: https://www.elseview.com/legal/privacy-policy