Dear Law Student Journal Editors,

I am aware that you have a heavy burden in your law school years, selecting articles, editing them, and publishing them in your journal, often for minimal credit. And what I am going to suggest to you will add a little more work to your already overloaded plate. I apologize for that, but this suggestion will make potential authors more likely to submit their articles for you to publish. And I will also suggest that help will be available to you through the library.

My suggestion is that your articles need to have DOIs assigned to them. A DOI is a digital object identifier. It is a unique label for every scholarly article that is published. You have seen them on the articles cited in your journal. Some of you are probably thoroughly familiar with them from your undergraduate studies. Although the Bluebook does not require DOIs in citations (Yet! I’m working on that), having a DOI makes tracking the use of your articles so much easier. A DOI is permanent, and if something happens to your publishing platform, and you need to switch to a new one, the DOI can redirect readers from your old site to the new one, seamlessly. You can also offer your authors the metrics by tracking the use of the DOI in citations, downloads, and views. The creation of DOIs, called “minting”, can be done by the library staff, if you wish.

Remember to read my next post in this series on adding abstracts to your article landing pages to increase SEO!

Sincerely,

Your Library Liaison