Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/5

. 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). 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. 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.

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. Open access