Retteen, Aaron and Hall, Malikah, Persistent Identifiers and the Next Generation of Legal Scholarship (February 22, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3168863 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3168863

“The world of scholarly communications has seen distinct growth regarding the use of persistent identifiers in the effort to preserve, disseminate, analyze, and help locate academic content. A persistent identifier is a unique string of letters, numbers, and/or symbols associated with digital content that will never change over time. Persistent identifiers exist in different forms and for different functions, and this Article will discuss the importance and relevance to legal scholarship of two of the most pervasive persistent identifiers in scholarly communications – the digital object identifier (DOI) and the ORCID identifier (ORCID iD). The use of persistent identifiers in academic publishing has become so pervasive that robust, data-driven services have been developed and integrated into the publication process that rely on and leverage this information standard. Publishers of legal scholarship and other legal materials have not widely adopted persistent identifiers, and, as a result, the legal discipline cannot enjoy the variety of benefits offered by this system. In addition, legal scholarship will be left out of future developments and innovations that rely on persistent identifiers to measure impact and other bibliometrics of scholarship. Obtaining disciplinary adoption of persistent identifiers is necessary, prudent, and feasible. This Article will identify existing barriers regarding the implementation of persistent identifiers among publishers of legal scholarship, as well as provide an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals. This Article concludes with a call to action for all stakeholders in legal publishing to adopt persistent identifiers and usher in a new generation for legal scholarship and other legal materials.”