Harvard, Open Access, and the Growing Role of the Internet in Legal Scholarship

In my paper, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives:  Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings, I noted that in a matter of years, all legal scholars would need to have a significant Internet presence, that it would no longer be enough to maintain reputation by publishing in the top rated law journals.  This observation arose out of the recognition that more and more people were acquiring information over the Internet.  The paper further noted that blogging represented an important method of establishing the requisite Internet presence but that most faculty at top schools were avoiding this avenue, providing unusual opportunities for scholars at lower ranked schools.  

With that in mind, that Harvard Law School just announced a policy of open access to the articles of its faculty.  As the press release noted:

• Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.   

The articles are likely available already on SSRN but that data base only permits searches by abstract, not the contents of the paper.  The data base proposed by the Harvard Law Faculty will allow for textual searches.  The policy will, therefore, facilitate Internet searches, making the information easier to find and likely increasing the number of citations to the pieces in the data base. 

The impact will likely be modest but it does increase the Internet footprint of the Harvard faculty.  Most likely other law schools will follow, particularly those with the resources to implement this type of policy.  It does not, however, do much to advertise the unique ideas in the scholarly work.  For that, other avenues will be necessary, including blog posts that are written in an accessible format that link to papers and articles providing greater detail on the topic.

It should be noted that The Race to the Bottom is now in the Lexis-Nexis data base, specifically in the newspaper file.  This will also increase the footprint of the Blog, one already augmented by the circulation of all posts in the SM Blogwatch, a publication issued by Securities Mosaic, a newsletter distributed to thousands of lawyers operating in the corporate securities area.