Valeri Craigle had been thinking about DOIs long before the Utah Law Review adopted them. As Head of Technical Services and Digital Initiatives at the James E. Faust Law Library at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, she had seen firsthand the challenges that come with managing a law review’s digital presence over time. Platforms change. Websites get redesigned. Repositories migrate.

Between 2009 and 2017, the Utah Law Review moved from Open Journal Systems to law school-hosted servers and eventually to Digital Commons. While each transition brought improvements, it also created a long-term access problem.

“Any link to an article in the Utah Law Review created before 2017 is now broken,” Valeri said.

For years, she received requests from researchers and members of the public looking for articles that were no longer available through their original links. Looking back, she sees DOIs as a solution that could have preserved access throughout those transitions.

“If we’d had DOIs, there would have been continual access to these materials and a much easier migration process,” she said.

A DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a permanent identifier assigned to a scholarly work. Unlike a standard URL, which can break when a website changes, a DOI remains constant and redirects users to the current location of the content. DOIs also make scholarship easier to find because they are recognized and indexed across scholarly databases, citation systems, and research platforms.

DOIs aren’t just a publishing trend. They help ensure long-term access to scholarship, support discoverability, simplify migrations between systems, and make citations more reliable over time. Yet many law reviews still don’t have them.

Why Has Legal Scholarship Been Slow to Adopt DOIs?

Outside of legal publishing, DOI adoption is standard practice. Most academic disciplines have embraced persistent identifiers as an essential part of scholarly communication.

Law reviews have been slower to follow. Valeri believes part of the reason is cultural.

Valeri’s interest in DOI adoption predated the Utah Law Review project by several years. In 2022, she co-authored the article Ending Law Review Link Rot: A Plea for Adopting DOI, which argued for wider DOI adoption in legal scholarship, outlining many of the same challenges around discoverability, citation persistence, and long-term access that eventually motivated the Utah Law Review initiative.

“Law reviews don’t see themselves as publishers,” she explained. “They just want to finish the issues and get them out and leave the access, dissemination, and archival work to someone else.”

There are practical barriers as well. Before DOI implementation could move forward, Valeri had to make the case internally for why it mattered. That meant convincing the law review’s faculty advisor, library leadership, and student editors that the long-term benefits justified the additional work and cost. “No one wants to take on extra work, and people are afraid to commit to something they don’t understand, especially in the long term,” she said.

The challenge extended beyond administration. DOI adoption required changes to the law review’s editorial workflow. Student editors were already responsible for checking every footnote citation for accuracy and Bluebook compliance. Valeri was asking them to add another step by identifying and including DOIs where available, a practice that was not yet reflected in Bluebook rules at the time. Since then, DOI citation practices have become increasingly accepted across scholarly publishing, and newer editions of the Bluebook now provide guidance for including them.

There were financial considerations as well. Crossref membership carries ongoing costs, and obtaining institutional support required demonstrating that DOI adoption was a worthwhile investment.

Looking back, Valeri believes a seed grant awarded by the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) and Hein’s interest in the project helped reinforce that this was not simply a technical experiment, but an important investment in the future of legal scholarship. Even after finding a path forward for newly published content, one challenge remained. “There’s no way I could have done this by myself for our back issues going back to 1949,” she said.

Doesn’t Hein Already Do That?

As part of her research into DOI adoption, Valeri regularly spoke with other librarians about why law journals had not embraced DOIs at the same rate as other disciplines.

Again and again, she heard the same question. “Doesn’t Hein already do that for us?”

The question stuck with her. At the time, the answer was no. Hein was not registering DOIs for law reviews. However, Valeri had worked with Hein previously during the rollout of ORCID services and knew the company shared her interest in improving the discoverability of legal scholarship. She also knew Hein played an important role in the law review community.

“We’ve trusted our journals with Hein for decades, and I think there is a perception that Hein might be even better stewards of our content than we are because it has been a stable and reliable platform for all these years, even as our own journal repositories have been unstable/unreliable.”

Valeri Craigle
Head of Technical Services and Digital Initiatives

Valeri approached Hein about exploring what a DOI solution for law reviews might look like. That conversation ultimately led to a partnership between the Utah Law, Hein, and Crossref, the nonprofit organization that registers and maintains DOIs for scholarly publications.

Putting the Pieces in Place

Working with Crossref and the Utah Law, Hein developed a workflow that would allow DOI registration to become part of the journal’s publishing process without creating additional technical burdens for the law school.

For Valeri, one of the biggest benefits was having someone else handle the pieces that felt unfamiliar.

“Having Hein do the initial technical setup was such a relief,” she said. “I didn’t understand some of the technical language in Crossref’s setup manual.”

That support extended well beyond setup. “Hein does our metadata deposits for us,” Valeri explained. “The only thing I have to do is continue to manage the website and work with law review editors to ensure compliance with Crossref’s article requirements.”

Getting DOIs up and running was only part of the project. Once the workflow was in place, Hein continued to provide reports, answer questions, and help keep things moving.

A key part of the project was the work performed by Hein’s Senior Full-Stack Developer, Karlene, who helped extract article data and manage the deposit process.

“Building the Utah Law Review DOI integration required connecting multiple metadata mappings and workflows,” Karlene explained. “The result was a fully automated process that mints DOIs through Crossref, links them to new issues, and returns confirmations without manual intervention.”

For Valeri, having that technical expertise available was invaluable.

“Having Karlene figure out how to extract our data and perform those deposits for us was a weight lifted,” Valeri said. “This work is in addition to what I already have to do in Digital Commons.”

Having Hein manage the technical setup and metadata deposits allowed the Utah team to focus on the journal itself rather than the mechanics of DOI registration.

For Karlene, the collaboration was one of the most rewarding aspects of the project.

“Working with Valeri at Utah Law Review was especially rewarding—her appreciation, attentiveness, and enthusiasm for the project made the collaboration enjoyable and provided extra motivation to deliver a successful solution.”

Karlene Kardysauskas
Senior Full-Stack Developer

Looking Ahead

It is still too early to measure the long-term impact of DOI adoption on citations and usage for the Utah Law Review. Even so, Valeri is convinced the effort was worthwhile.

“It’s critical,” she said. “People go to Hein to obtain the version of record.”

She also believes broader adoption is inevitable. “I do think DOI adoption will become standard for law reviews.”

For institutions that have considered DOIs but assumed the process would be too complicated or time-consuming, her advice is simple. “It’s easier than you think, and the benefits are enormous.”

Looking back on the project, Valeri describes it as more than a technical initiative. “This was a rewarding partnership between law review creators and the company most trusted in the aggregation, dissemination, and discovery of law review content that produced some groundbreaking results.”

For Valeri, the project demonstrated that DOI adoption is possible, even for journals that have delayed implementation for years because of cost, workflow concerns, or limited staff resources.

Thinking about DOI registration but unsure where to start? You’re not alone. Many law reviews assume the process is complicated or requires significant technical expertise. Our work with Utah Law Review showed that it can be implemented with surprisingly little disruption. Contact us to learn what DOI registration could look like for your journal.