A recently published paper concludes that law review articles freely available on the internet are consistently cited more frequently than non-open access articles from the same publications.
In Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship, James Donovan and Carol Watson conclude that open access legal scholarship, which today appears to account for almost half of the nonmonographic output of law faculties, can expect to receive 58% more citations than non-open access writings of similar age from the same publications.
Unlike previous studies, which have analyzed literature from different disciplines, this study is the first to focus exclusively on legal scholarship, looking at the citation rates of articles from three law journals over a period of 18 years. The article also discusses various theories as to why open access increases the impact of scholarship.
For more, go to the full paper.
Hat tip to The TaxProf Blog.
