interest. Inaccessible scholarship is unpersuasive scholarship, and studies have tended to suggest that opening access to scholarly works correlates with greater scholarly impact (as measured by citation counts).[1] Researchers’ growing reliance on the Internet as a complement—and perhaps, one day, a successor—to proprietary databases or library hard copies feeds the demand for open access to scholarly works.[2] Furthermore, the same technologies that enable open access to traditional legal scholarship also give scholars new forms to express themselves, creating forms of scholarly discourse that would have been uneconomical to produce in the pre-Internet era.[3]
The movement to assure open access to scholarship is more advanced outside the legal academy. The difference is partly explained by differing market dynamics: University libraries, driven by eye-popping increases in subscription costs for specialized research journals, responded by dropping subscriptions, creating a risk that scholars working in those specialized fields would find it more difficult both to remain abreast of developments and to ensure dissemination of their own work to their peers.[4] Open access
- ↑ See Willinsky, supra note 8, at 22 ( “[O]pen access is associated with increased citations for authors and journals, when compared to similar work that is not open access”); id. at 22–24 (summarizing research). For a look at some of the methodological pitfalls of studies of this type, as well as some possible solutions, see Bernard S. Black & Paul L. Caron, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83, 92–95 (2006).
- ↑ See Solum, supra note 8, at 859 (“There will come a day when the saying, ‘If it isn’t on the net, it doesn’t exist,’ is true. Open access legal scholarship will be the only legal scholarship that is actually read. Closed access legal scholarship will be the tree that falls with no one in the forest.”); Carol A. Parker, Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship, 37 N.M. L. Rev. 431, 431 (2007) (suggesting that “open access to legal scholarship will soon be adopted and implement ed by every law school in the United States”); Richard A. Danner et al., The Twenty-First Century Law Library, 101 Law Libr. J. 143, 146 (2009) (“[T]he fact that young people are going to Google and to Wikipedia first is a call to arms in a way”) (comments of Richard A. Danner).
- ↑ See, e.g., Marci Hoffman & Katherine Topulos, Tyranny of the Available: Under-Represented Topics, Approaches, and Viewpoints, 35 Syracuse J. Int’l L. & Com. 175, 188–90 (2008);Paul L. Caron, Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U.L. Rev. 1025 (2006).
- ↑ See Willinsky, supra note 8, ch. 2; Dan Hunter, Walled Gardens, 62 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 607, 613–17 (2005). The effect of subscription costs as a driver of open access is surely greater in technical fields, where subscription rates for specialty publications may run into the thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars a year, than in law. But see Danner, supra note 8, at 377 (“[B]ecause they enjoy unlimited (and apparently cost-free) access to law journals and other information through Westlaw, LexisNexis, Hein Online, and other databases, it might be hard for law students and faculty to appreciate the impacts of access costs on researchers outside the U.S. legal education environment.”); Solum, supra note 8, at 863 (“[A]s you move from major research universities to regional universities to local colleges, the access of faculty and students to closed electronic databases (Westlaw, LexisNexis, JSTOR, etc.) begins to become
