Legal scholarship openly accessible is 50% more likely to be cited than articles published in proprietary journals

March 30th, 2011

Interesting paper on SSRN, titled Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship. Here is the abstract:

To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of open access on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journals at the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarship freely available via open access improves an article’s research impact. Open access legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of the output of law faculties – can expect to receive 50% more citations than non-open access writings of similar age from the same venue.

I place all of my articles on SSRN, and I always ensure to negotiate that right with the journals I work with. I frequently research articles on SSRN. If I have to go to West Law to find something, I may just find something else freely available. This makes sense.