New Collection of Legal Materials from Open Access Repositories

Publisher bepress recently launched The Digital Commons Network that "brings together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges, providing open access to peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work" [About page]

One of the subsets is the Law Network, which already has more than 100,000 articles from 170 institutions. The institutions all seem to be U.S. universities.

It is possible to sign up for free to follow all new legal scholarship, content in a specific practice area, from a specific institution or author.

This appears to be an interesting complement to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). The SSRN Abstract Database has abstracts on over 466,400 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 378,900 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. One of the SSRN subdivisions is the Legal Scholarship Network (which does have Canadian content).

[Source: WisBlawg, University of Wisconsin Law Library]