The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews

Open access legal scholarship generates a prolific discussion, but few empirical details have been available to describe the scholarly impact of providing unrestricted access to law review articles. The present project fills this gap with specific findings on what authors and law reviews can expect. Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a lower OA advantage (11.4%) due to the attention such prestigious works routinely receive regardless of the format. When focusing on the availability of new scholarship, as compared to creating retrospective collections, the aggregated advantage rises to 60.2%. While the first tier advantage rises to 16.8%, the mid-tiers skyrocket to 89.7%. The fourth tier OA advantage comes in at 81.2%. Citations of legal articles by courts is similarly impacted by OA availability. While the 15-year aggregate advantage is a mere 9.5%, new scholarship is 41.4% more likely to be cited by a court decision if it is available in open access format. James M. Donovan is Director and James and Mary Lassiter Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky 1 College of Law. Carol A. Watson is Law Library Director at the University of Georgia School of Law. Caroline Osborne is Assistant Dean of Legal Information Services & Professor of Legal Research at Washington & Lee School of Law. The authors thank the following for their assistance collecting the citation data analyzed for this project: Laura Paige Robinson (University of Kentucky), Charles Eno (University of Georgia), and the 2013 Andrew W. McThenia, Jr., Research Assistants and Mary Coffey (Washington & Lee University). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Donovan et al. cite as: Edison 2015-03A