Open-Source Alternatives to Digital Commons

A significant number of law schools have adopted BePress' Digital Commons as their hosting platform, and institutional repository, for student journals, faculty scholarship, and journal symposia.  With the acquisition of BePress by Elsevier, some in our community are concerned that a single vendor owns the entire "life-cycle" of legal scholarship as one company owns SSRN, Expresso, and Digital Commons.  In response, some law schools are considering open-source alternatives to Digital Commons both due to budgetary constraints and concerns about a vendor having too much control over how a law school manages its own intellectual output.

This session will discuss alternatives to Digital Commons, including:

• The Hyku and Hyrax project from Duraspace based on Fedora.
• The upcoming release of Dspace 7
• The Python-based Tind platform based on Invenio
• The Islandora project based on Drupal and Fedora
• The Open Journal System project from the Public Knowledge Project