bepress recently launched a new product called The Digital Commons Network. It indexes and makes available scholarship contained in the broad network of open access institutional repositories that use the Digital Commons platform. Digital Common Network is available to researchers at no cost.
According to the about page, “the Digital Commons Network brings together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges, providing open access to peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.”
The main Network covers all subject areas included in the Digital Commons repositories. However, legal researchers may be most interested in the Law Network, which is a subset of the full product.
Once in the Law Network, you can do a broad search for scholarship in all legal subject areas, or you can narrow your search by practice area first (on the left). On the right side, there is a display of the most popular institutions, authors or articles in that subject area. This is based on the number of downloads.
There are also several options to follow content by email. You can follow all new scholarship or just content in a specific practice area or choose to follow the most popular institutions, authors or articles.