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Faculty Scholarship Support: Use, Access & Preservation

This guide is intended to help law faculty navigate the process of submitting papers to law journals.

Use, Access, and Preservation

The library assists faculty members in optimizing the impact of their scholarship and preserving their works. Below is information intended to help you prepare and effectively enable your scholarship to be displayed on our institutional repository.

Review Your Author Agreement

Before placing your scholarship in the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) or in the UH ScholarSpace repository, review your journal publication agreement.

  • Does it impose an embargo on posting the article on a personal, institutional, or research-sharing website?
  • Does it limit your ability to post draft versions of the article to open-access repositories?
  • Did the journal receive an exclusive license to your work? If so, for what period of time?

If the publication agreement is not clear, or if you don’t yet have a publication agreement, reach out to the journal and request permission to post your accepted or published article to SSRN or the UH ScholarSpace repository.

Open Access

Another consideration is whether a journal makes content freely accessible online, which studies have found leads to a citation advantage over publishing in subscription-based journals. To determine whether a journal is open access, consult the copyright policies on the journal 's website, or try searching for the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals and/or SHERPA/RoMEO, which aggregates copyright policies. Note that if a journal does not make content openly accessible, you may still be able to self-archive a version of your work in the University of HawaiĘ»i ScholarSpace repository as well as platforms such as SSRN.

Access & Preservation

  • For works not published in open-access law reviews or journals, the library assists with obtaining necessary copyright permissions to place the works in as many access points as possible.
  • The library strives to preserve access to faculty scholarship in multiple formats.
  • The library maintains a permanent collection of faculty writings. This collection includes scholarly publications in all tangible formats. Faculty members wishing to be included in the collection should submit tangible copies of their publications to the library.