Allard Law’s open-access research portal, the Allard Research Commons, has reached a significant new milestone with one million downloads of its research papers by users worldwide.
Launched in 2017 with the goal of making Allard Law research more accessible, the Allard Research Commons hosts a wide range of scholarly works, including articles, books and working papers by Allard Law faculty, graduate students’ theses and dissertations, and the UBC Law Journal and the Canadian Journal of Family Law.
The project was initiated under the leadership of Dr. Natasha Affolder, former Associate Dean of Research and International.
“We launched the Allard Research Commons as a way of sharing the thoughtful, socially aware and innovative legal research that Allard faculty members are known for,” says Affolder. “Rather than being barricaded behind institutional memberships, library databases or publisher-imposed fees, our scholarship would be available for anyone to download for free from anywhere in the world.”
Affolder says the decision to make the platform open access reflects how the law school faculty see their role in the world. “The scholarship produced at Allard Law influences the way that law is conceptualized, taught, debated, reformed – and hopefully how it is used for good,” she adds.
Dr. Aleksandar Petrovic, Research Grants and Awards Manager at Allard Law, has been involved in developing and maintaining the Allard Research Commons since it was first envisioned. He notes that numerous faculty members have attributed finding new audiences for their scholarship and making “unexpected academic and non-academic connections thanks to the discoverability of their work through the Allard Research Commons.”
UBC Law Library Reference Librarian Elim Wong has likewise supported the development of the Allard Research Commons since its beginnings. She believes that making legal scholarship freely available through the Commons has played an important role in “advancing justice in marginalized and underserved communities in British Columbia and globally.”
Since its launch eight years ago, Allard Law faculty research has been downloaded in nearly every country worldwide.
Dr. Graham Reynolds, Associate Dean of Research and International at Allard Law, says he’s grateful to the Allard Research Commons team for all the work they’ve done to make the Commons such a success. “We were able to reach this milestone because of the hard work that Aleks and Elim have done, behind the scenes, to support, maintain and expand the Commons. Each download is a testament to their work as well as the work of our scholarly community.”
In the coming months, the team plans to expand the repository with a new section featuring graduate student publications. The expansion aims to help share the work of Allard Law’s graduate students more broadly, raising both their profiles as well as that of the law school’s graduate programs.
“A million downloads is definitely worth celebrating,” says Affolder. “I hope that this impressive body of scholarly literature is approached as a starting point for new thinking, discoveries, collaborations and conversations. Ideas change the world – and sharing ideas, as well as doubts and questions about those ideas, can be one of the richest and most rewarding aspects of being a scholar.”
