One Million Downloaded Articles from the Carolina Law Scholarship Repository

The Carolina Law Scholarship Repository is an online resource for most articles published in UNC School of Law’s five student-edited law journals; faculty scholarly articles, essays, and policy papers; and some special digital collections. Launched by the Kathrine R. Everett Law Library in December 2015, the repository has since added more than 8,600 works that are freely available to the public. Earlier this month, readers from around the world have now downloaded more than 1 million copies of those works.

According to repository statistics, readers from every country in the world, representing more than 30,000 unique education, government, or private-sector institutions, have accessed our scholarship repository. And during a time when access to physical library spaces is limited, people with an internet connection will continue to be able to download articles to aid their research.

Most of the documents on the repository are the products of The North Carolina Law Review, The North Carolina Journal of International Law, The North Carolina Banking Institute, The North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology, and First Amendment Law Review. Library staff works with law journal editors to make new articles, comments, and notes available upon publication.

There are more than 600 faculty works on the repository as well, including many self-archived versions of recent publications, more of which are being added on a regular basis. Works from this collection have been downloaded nearly 70,000 times. Faculty works only began to be added as part of a pilot project a little more than two years ago, and the collection saw its highest monthly download total in January 2020.

The repository also contains a unique trove of documents, the National Mortgage Settlements Digital Archive, related to settlements made between state attorneys general, the Department of Justice, and institutions involved in the mortgage servicing and mortgage origination industries. These documents created new legal standards prior to the creation of the CFPB and provide information on the monitoring of mortgage servicers and originators in the years following the settlements.

For more information, please see our page About the Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. Here’s to the next million downloads!