Scholastica: Scholastica is used by many law reviews for article submission. For assistance with the Law School's institutional subscription, contact Sadaf Syed, Academic Affairs Manager.
SSRN: Law faculty often post working and accepted papers and book chapters to the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) to increase the visibility of their scholarship. The Research and Academic Centers team will provide support to faculty who would like to upload their papers to SSRN, including to the University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics Research Paper Series and the University of Chicago Law School, Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series.
Faculty may submit papers for upload to SSRN through the following channels:
If you are submitting your empirical research to law review journals for publication, please note that some journals require you to submit the data and code you used as well. The below table is a list of some of the journals that have such policies, along with their submission requirements. Please note that this list is not exhaustive and is being updated. If you have questions, please contact us at FacultyWeb!
| Journal | Submission Requirements | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Boston College Law Review | Authors are encouraged to make the data and code used for their submission openly accessible. Also encouraged to include step by step overview of the methodology used. | Not clear |
| Boston University Law Review | Authors of articles containing empirical analysis are required to submit the data used in the analysis | within 72 hours of submitting the article for publication consideration on Scholastica |
| Michigan Law Review | authors of empirical papers should be prepared to provide any datasets and experimental procedures not included in the text of the paper | Upon being accepted for publication |
| Northwestern Law Review |
Where not otherwise evident from the text of the article, submit a brief statement (no more than two pages) explaining the study design, methodology, and/or analysis of the empirical work underlying the article, as applicable. Authors submitting a manuscript involving data from human subjects must also submit an IRB approval or exemption. Authors submitting empirical pieces are required to submit data sets and/or supporting materials along with their articles. Such supporting materials might include, but are not limited to, data sets, spreadsheet files showing data analysis, visual representations, statistical software code, codebooks and coding protocols, survey instruments, lists of interview questions, and the like. |
At submission |
| NYU Law Review | authors are expected to provide any datasets and experimental procedures not included in the text of the paper to the Law Review for publication on its website, unless an exception is made prior to acceptance. | Before the printing phase of the production schedule. |
| Stanford Law Review | empirical works must document and archive all datasets so that third parties may replicate the published findings. These datasets will be published on the journal's website | Condition for acceptance |
| Vanderbilt Law Review | Any procedures, methodology, or robustness checks not included in the body of the article must be included in an appendix to the article. | Upon request |
| Virginia Law Review | any supporting documentation (such as data files and/or result print-outs) | within 7 days of accepting an offer to publish. |
| Yale Journal on Regulation | The code and datasets employed in the paper for review. If the piece is accepted for publication, the journal will also publish all associated code and datasets. | At submission |
| Yale Law Journal | Authors must either (a) upload data, replication code, and/or README file to the Journal’s Dataverse or (b) submit a waiver explaining why the data is confidential, proprietary, or otherwise unable to be shared. | At submission |
The OA movement focuses on the removal of barriers that stand between a user and information. OA literature, data, and education resources are "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions" (Open Access Research Guide). The removal of barriers allows the scholarship to reach a wider audience, thus increasing its potential impact.
Chicago Unbound is the University of Chicago Law School's faculty scholarship repository, and this repository makes the full text of faculty scholarship available when permitted by applicable copyright law. For more information about Chicago Unbound, please see the Chicago Unbound page of this guide.
To provide more options for faculty to publish in open access journals, the University of Chicago Library has entered into agreements with publishers such as Cambridge University Press and Wiley Publishing to provide free open access publishing for University of Chicago faculty, students, and staff.
If you are interested in publishing a book open access, there is a helpful toolkit available.
For more information about open access publishing, including the work that the University of Chicago is doing to facilitate open access, please see the Open Access Research Guide from the Center for Digital Scholarship.
Similar to the OA movement, the OER movement seeks to decrease the barriers to access to educational materials. OERs are defined as "freely-accessible teaching, educational, and research materials that either exist in the public domain or are available to users via an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing." (Principles and Examples of OER, George Mason University). If you are interested in publishing course materials that are open access, please consider the below resources
Protect your copyright in your own scholarly work by adding language to your publishing agreements that preserves your right to use your scholarship on your personal websites, on course management websites, and for conferences and presentations. Some boilerplate addenda to publishing agreements are available below: