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Volume 65 
Number 1 Fair Housing Article 1 
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Buffalo Law Review 
1846 
VOLUME LXV 
2017 
BUFFALO, NEW YORK 
Copyright 2017 
Buffalo Law Review 
University at Buffalo School of Law 
THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK 
Nancy L. Zimpher, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. 
Chancellorof the State University of New York 
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English

Title Page

Magavern, Sam

Bartley, Aaron

The PUSH Green Development Zone: Building Housing Equity from the Ground Up

In response to Richard Albert’s Quasi-Constitutional Amendments, 65 BUFF. L. REV. 739 (2017)

Lupo, Nicola

Two Examples of “Quasi-Constitutional Amendments” From the Italian Constitutional Evolution—A Response to Richard Albert

Marshfield, Jonathan L.

Respecting the Mystery of Constitutional Change

Beatty, John R.

University at Buffalo School of Law 
Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law 
Law Librarian Other Scholarship Law Librarian Scholarship 
Fall 9-18-2017 
Building Our Own Tools in the Age of Elsevier: AALL 2017 Through 
the Lens of the bepress Acquisition 
John Beatty 
University at Buffalo School of Law, jrbeatty@buffalo.edu 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/
law_librarian_other_scholarship 
 Part of the Law Librarianship Commons 
Recommended Citation 
John Beatty, Building Our Own Tools in the Age of Elsevier: AALL 2017 Through the Lens of the bepress 
Acquisition, 37 ALL-SIS Newsl. 6 (2017). 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/law_librarian_other_scholarship/30 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Librarian Scholarship at Digital Commons @ 
University at Buffalo School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Law Librarian Other Scholarship by an 
authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law. For more information, please 
contact lawscholar@buffalo.edu. 
ALL-SIS Newsletter Page 6 
A 
t the beginning of August, Elsevier announced 
its acquisition of bepress. This was big and 
surprising news to the academic law library 
community. Over one third of ABA-accredited U.S. law 
schools have an active repository hosted on bepress’s 
Digital Commons and several others, including my 
own institution, the University at Buffalo Law 
School—are currently building their 
repositories on the platform. 
Unsurprisingly, reaction to the 
news has been negative.1 
I recently returned to the 
legal academy after getting 
my JD and spending a few 
years practicing law in 
Syracuse. A few weeks 
before Elsevier’s 
announcement, I attended 
my first AALL Annual 
Meeting in several years. 
One of my tasks as the new 
faculty scholarship librarian 
at University of Buffalo is to 
work as part of a team that is 
building and populating the 
school’s Digital Commons repository. 
Toward that goal, I spent a lot of time at the 
Annual Meeting attending technology and repository-
related programs. Upon reflection, most of the 
programs I attended fit a theme of librarians 
transforming their libraries, in part by building their 
own tools. The bepress acquisition has made this idea 
even more relevant, and I can’t help but look at my 
conference experience through this lens. 
1 See, e.g., Elsevier Acquires bepress, The Scholarly Kitchen (2017), https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/08/02/
elsevier-acquires-bepress/; Elsevier Continues To Build Its Monopoly Solution for All Aspects of Scholarly Communica-
tion, Techdirt, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170804/05454537924/elsevier-continues-to-build-monopoly-solution-
all-aspects-scholarly-communication.shtml; What Was BePress?, Gavia Libraria, https://gavialib.com/2017/08/what-was
-bepress/. 
Digital Repositories, Law Libraries, and the Future of 
Open Access 
In Digital Repositories, Law Libraries, and  the 
Future of Open Access (session G2 on Tuesday, July 18th at 
8:30 a.m.), presenters Carol Watson from the University 
of Georgia, Gregg Gordon from SSRN, and Corie 
Dugas from NELLCO discussed the ten-year history 
of the legal industry’s involvement in digital 
repositories and the need to think 
about the next steps.  
First, Watson summarized 
the history of law schools and 
institutional repositories. 
Although about half of U.S. 
law schools have an 
institutional repository 
and roughly 300 U.S. and 
international schools have 
a series on SSRN, there 
are no standards for open 
access, interoperability, or 
metadata. She also discussed 
the need to communicate the 
impact of these systems to our 
constituents. For example, what do 
the download numbers actually mean? 
How do downloads translate to impact?  
Next, Gordon explained that his view of open 
access is “about innovation.” He believes the point of 
open access is to get research into the hands of other 
researchers before it’s available anywhere else. He sees 
the job of SSRN and Elsevier as providing a better 
interface. Elsevier won’t charge for content. The benefit 
it gets is to look at the connections between researchers, 
 Building Our Own Tools in the Age of Elsevier 
AALL 2017 Through the Lens of the bepress Acquisition 
John Beatty, University at Buffalo School of Law  
continued on page 7 
Page 7 Volume 
and leverage that. When asked about ethical concerns 
regarding how that research is conducted, he basically 
dodged the question by stating that Elsevier has “a 
team that focuses on privacy” and that it would receive 
no benefit to steer toward an agenda or view.  
Finally, Dugas spoke about LawArXiv, which 
intends to provide a permanent hosting platform for 
open access research that is owned and maintained by 
the member institutions. The project is very new and 
will be shaped by the institutions, in particular the 
librarians, using it. LawArXiv was started as a reaction 
to Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN.  
Law Repositories Caucus Meeting and 
Roundtables 
The Law Repositories Caucus roundtables (held on 
Sunday, July 16th at 12:45 p.m.) featured two sessions 
and a number of tables, each hosting a different topic. I 
spent both sessions at the metrics table, where the 
discussion revolved largely around two subjects: the 
difficulties involved in collecting citation counts in law, 
and methods of communicating this information to the 
faculty and administration.  
Several communications ideas were discussed, and 
my favorite was the school that compiles a quarterly 
report on all permanent faculty showing SSRN 
downloads, downloads from the school’s Digital 
Commons repository, and citations for each faculty 
member.  
Unfortunately, no solutions were forthcoming for 
the citation count problem. The main issue in citation 
gathering is that the large bibliometric databases like 
Web of Science and Scopus don’t collect student-edited 
law reviews, where the vast majority of law professor 
scholarship is published, because they are not peer-
reviewed. This limits librarians to using labor-intensive 
tools including Harzing’s Publish or Perish and Plum 
Analytics (also recently acquired by Elsevier) to gather 
the data. Because no one tool covers the majority of 
journals where law professors publish, librarians must 
spent a lot of time compiling the data from the various 
tools and weeding out duplicates.  
Watson in the Law Library 
In Watson in the Law Library  (session F6 on 
Monday, July 17th at 2:00 p.m.), Fastcase CEO Ed 
Walters and Brian Kuhn, from IBM’s Watson team, 
explored the idea that information professionals should 
be building their own AI tools and not merely using 
them as consumers. AI tools are a collection of 
algorithms that can understand context and meaning, 
and can reason, learn, and interact with people or other 
tools. As Walters explained, the main difference 
between AI tools and traditional tools is that AI tools 
can work with unstructured data. Most institutional 
data is unstructured and, consequently, AI tools are 
potentially very powerful. He also stated that the 
current focus on lawyers being replaced by AI tools 
perpetuates a negative stereotype that is unhelpful. 
Instead of replacing human intelligence, these tools 
should be used to augment human intelligence by 
being applied to “brute force” tasks that are time-
consuming. 
The presentation focused on two systems, Watson 
and Fastcase’s AI sandbox, and their potential 
application to law organizations, particularly law 
firms. Walters and Kuhn suggested a number of 
possible projects that could be implemented in law 
organizations, including 
workflow tools for 
companies to evaluate 
efficiency of outside counsel 
or for outside counsel to 
evaluate their own efficiency 
and billing practices against 
their clients’ guidelines; analysis tools that could use 
prospective jurors’ social media accounts to assist in 
jury selection or use a judge’s previous written 
decisions to forecast a prospective ruling; and support 
tools to more efficiently perform pro bono work. The 
program closed with Walters’ challenge to everyone in 
the room to start using AI tools to build specialized 
tools for their own organizations.  
Bringing It All Together 
 Although the perspectives and specifics of each 
session were different, there were a few big ideas that 
started to take shape for me while at the conference. 
Looking at the bepress acquisition in the context of its 
other recent acquisitions, it appears that Elsevier is 
attempting to purchase the entire mechanism of 
scholarly communication. Although SSRN and bepress 
stress that researchers will continue to have free access 
to content and that institutions will continue to own 
continued on page 8 
[A] few big ideas  … 
started to take 
shape for me while 
at the conference. 
continued from page 6 
Building Our Own Tools in the Age of 
Elsevier 
-their own data, it appears that in Elsevier’s world, 
those institutions will pay Elsevier dearly for access to 
the mechanisms of scholarly communication. We’ll pay 
it for our faculty to submit content to journals. We’ll 
pay it again to publish and host those journals. And 
we’ll pay it to host the scholarly output of our own 
faculty. 
Looked at in this light, the lack of metadata 
standards in our repositories may be a problem. How 
many schools are going to find that they didn’t give 
enough thought to how their metadata is organized in 
bepress, and will need to do further work if they wish 
to migrate to another system in the future? Any such 
migration is not likely to happen soon. SSRN and 
Digital Commons are too entrenched for institutions to 
abandon them in the near future. However, it is time 
that law librarians as a community start to build 
alternatives to the tools that Elsevier is purchasing, 
before we are irreversibly locked in. I think when most 
of us think about open access, we are also thinking 
platform-independent. Under the current landscape, it 
may be necessary to think beyond using open source 
tools to build repositories, and instead build our own 
open source scholarly 
communication 
infrastructure. An 
infrastructure that can’t be 
easily sold because it is 
owned not by a single entity 
but by the community. 
LawArXiv is one such 
possibility. Shortly after the bepress announcement, 
LawArXiv stated that it intends to look into replacing 
other Digital Commons functionality in the future. 
But we must think beyond simply looking for a 
replacement for Digital Commons or other services 
offered by bepress. We should take up the challenge 
and start to look at ways we can use AI tools, and other 
tools, to replace costly services we’re currently buying 
from vendors, or to build our own tools beyond what 
vendors are offering. For example, can we build 
chatbots to assist our patrons when the reference desk 
is closed? Can we build research and knowledge 
ALL-SIS Newsletter Page 8 
continued from page 7 
Building Our Own Tools in the Age of 
Elsevier management tools to support our clinics? Can we build 
tools to sort through circulation data and other usage 
statistics to provide meaningful analysis of the 
disparate numbers provided by vendors?   
And yet this is not enough. We must also answer 
bigger questions. How can we build tools and services 
owned by the community and what does that look like? 
How can we forge partnerships between law libraries 
and non-law libraries to build a scholarly 
communication infrastructure that is not tied to one 
vendor? How do we do this with limited resources and 
continually-shrinking budgets?  
[W]e must think 
beyond simply looking 
for a replacement for 
Digital Commons ... 


Building Our Own Tools in the Age of Elsevier: AALL 2017 Through the Lens of the bepress Acquisition

Boyack, Andrea J.

Equitably Housing (Almost) Half a Nation of Renters

Johnson, Kevin R.

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Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute

Not a member yet

Title Page

The PUSH Green Development Zone: Building Housing Equity from the Ground Up

Two Examples of “Quasi-Constitutional Amendments” From the Italian Constitutional Evolution—A Response to Richard Albert

Respecting the Mystery of Constitutional Change

Building Our Own Tools in the Age of Elsevier: AALL 2017 Through the Lens of the bepress Acquisition

Equitably Housing (Almost) Half a Nation of Renters

Some Thoughts on the Future of Legal Education: Why Diversity and Student Wellness Should Matter in a Time of Economic “Crisis”

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Re-Reading Legal Realism and Tracing a Genealogy of Balancing

UB Law Forum Volume 31 Number 2 Spring 2017

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