Persistent Identifiers and the Next Generation of Legal Scholarship

Abstract

This article discusses the importance of the most common persistent identifiers in scholarly communications—the digital object identifier and the ORCID identifier—to legal scholarship. Persistent identifiers help preserve and disseminate academic content and data-driven services that leverage this information standard are now integrated into the publication process. Because legal publishers have not widely adopted persistent identifiers, the legal discipline cannot enjoy the benefits offered by this system. This article looks at barriers to implementing persistent identifiers among legal publishers and provides an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals.

Keywords: digital object identifer, DOI, scholarly communication, legal scholarship, interdisciplinary work, legal publications, law reviews, persistent identifier, ORCID

JEL Classification: I21, I23, I29, K00, K49, Y10