James M. Donovan (Kentucky) & Carol A. Watson (Georgia) have posted Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship on SSRN. 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.

 

(Hat Tip: Tim Armstrong.)