The University of Alabama School of Law
The University of Alabama School of Law
Google Scholar offers access to many legal documents, including patents, legal opinions and journals. Users can use the search function or can find the "Advanced Search" option by selecting the icon that looks like three lines to the top left of the screen.
SSRN (formerly The Social Science Research Network) offers a large collection of working papers, both pre- and post-publication. These papers cover a range of academic subjects, most of which are outside of the legal field. However, they do offer the Legal Scholarship Network, which specifically collects law related papers.
The Directory of Open Access Journals collects open access journals on all topics and provides access to just under 14,000 journals without fees. The easiest way to access the law journals is to look towards the top left corner of the home page and hover over the "Search" tab, then select "Journals." From there, users will likely want to look to the left where the filters are and use the subject search bar to narrow their results by "Law." There are several different options for law so be careful in making sure you're searching the right topic. From there, users can further refine their results by filters such as searching for journals that are "Without Fees," by Language, or by Date.
Many JSTOR articles are only available to individuals at institutions with a JSTOR subscription. However, some are openly accessible for free on JSTOR, who partnered with leading presses to add open access ebooks to their collections. Thousands of titles are now available with more new titles continually added. Publishers include University of California press, Cornell University Press, NYU Press, and University of Michigan Press. They offer a growing collection of Open Access journals, as well as a large amount of freely available Early Journal Content, which are articles that were published prior to the last 95 years in the United States or prior to the last 143 years for internationally published materials.
The Law Archive is an initiative through Yale's Law Library to provide a free open access platform for legal scholarship that integrates collaboration tools, data storage, and the sharing of legal scholarship. Through the Law Archive, researchers, scholars, and the general public will have access to current and historical legal commentary and analysis found in legal scholarship, as well as resources such as research plans, preprints, fully published papers, and collected data that have been upload to the archive by researchers and scholars. Additionally, the archive has collaboration features that make it possible for researchers from different institutions to work on projects in a central project space, with the ability to integrate tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub.
Users can use the search bar to search for papers or browse by featured topic where users can narrow results by a handful of topic options. If the user doesn't know what keywords they want to use to search for papers and don't see the topic on the list of featured topics, there is an option to "See all subjects available," that can be found with the featured subjects list. If the users elects to search all subjects, they will be redirected to a page that shows all available results where users can then use the filters located to the left of the page to narrow their results.
Once a paper is selected, the user will be able to preview the paper before downloading. Users will also be able to read the abstract, supplemental materials (if there is any), subject and discipline tags, and options for several citation styles.