]u[ Ubiquity has published a case study on the transfer of LIRA@BCLaw, the Legal Institutional Repository and Archives at Boston College Law School, from the Digital Commons platform to ]u[ Ubiquity Repositories, and the simultaneous transfer of the journal Boston College Law Review (BCLR) to the ]u[ Ubiquity platform as a hosted journal.

LIRA, formerly called Digital Commons at BC Law, was founded 10 years ago and originally hosted on the Digital Commons platform by bepress, Elsevier. Part of the incentive behind the repository's founding was to contribute to the wider movement of making legal scholarly materials more freely and widely accessible, as well as to have a permanent home for BCLR. When the Digital Commons platform was purchased by Elsevier in 2017, the repository team became concerned that their commitment to openness could become jeopardised in the future, and so made the decision to migrate to ]u[ Ubiquity Repositories, which they felt offered an attractive and much improved alternative. They also decided to transfer BCLR from existing within the repository, to be hosted as an independent journal on the ]u[ Ubiquity platform.

The case study explores how migrating to ]u[ Ubiquity Repositories presented the team with an opportunity to refresh LIRA, and how the ]u[ Ubiquity platform offered improved features that have enriched the repository's functionality and user experience. It also explores how ]u[ Ubiquity's commitment to openness has ensured that LIRA remains fully in control of its own data, and aligned with Boston College Law's own values and commitment to contributing to open scholarship. The teams at both LIRA and ]u[ Ubiquity hope that the case study will provide insight into the value that an open source repository can bring to an institution, and that it will prove valuable to any institution with an existing repository that may be considering migrating platforms.

The full case study is available to read in full via ]u[ Ubiquity's website.

About ]u[ Ubiquity

]u[ Ubiquity is the leading provider of open publishing services, covering the entire research lifecycle. It provides open access journal and book publishing for academic societies, full publishing infrastructure and services to university presses, and open source repositories for institutions. Its team of professional and passionate experts are all dedicated to making open access and open science accessible to all. Find out more.

About LIRA@BC Law

The Legal Institutional Repository and Archives (LIRA) is an open access repository of intellectual and creative works managed by the Boston College Law Library to foster a community of scholars through the sharing of ideas. It was set up approximately ten years ago to collect, preserve, and promote the school's scholarly output, and to support the faculty's law publication, the Boston College Law Review (BCLR). LIRA@BC Law is hosted on ]u[ Ubiquity's open source repository platform.

Find out more.