Law Commons^™

The Open Access Advantage For American Law Reviews, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne

James M. Donovan

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 …

Law, Legitimacy, And The Maligned Adverb, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

The standard rules for good writing dictate that adverbs should be avoided. They undermine the effectiveness of the text and detract from the author’s point. Lawyers have incorporated this general rule, leading them not only to avoid adverbs in their own writings but also to overlook them in the writings of others, including statutes. However, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott has argued, law happens not in the rules but in the adverbs. Through its adverbs the law allows moral space for the citizen to consent to the social order, rather than merely conforming to an imposed command to comply. To become …

Will An Institutional Repository Hurt My Ssrn Ranking?: Calming The Faculty Fear, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson

James M. Donovan

Librarians have every reason to support the creation of an institutional digital repository (IR). An IR preserves the output of the intellectual life of the school, enables anyone with internet access to enjoy the benefits of the new knowledge, and promotes the institution and scholar by bringing to the foreground their intellectual achievements.

Plans for a new IR project within the law school, however, can quickly find such worthy motives swept aside as faculty members invariably voice some version of the following comments: “Won’t posting my articles elsewhere steal downloads away from SSRN? That would lower my rankings in SSRN …

Open Access: Good For Readers, Authors, And Journals, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson

James M. Donovan

Readers, authors, and even law journal publishers will all achieve their different but related interests by adopting open access principles. Readers of every kind will have more efficient access to the materials they need to pursue their intellectual and informational goals; authors will see their works read and cited by a broader audience; and law reviews and journals can raise their own profiles without injuring their revenue streams from fee-based sources. Open access works for everyone, and is the future of information creation and distribution.

Institutional Repositories: A Plethora Of Possibilities, Carol A. Watson, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

The law library can be a major contributing partner to the success of its law school by establishing a digital repository to preserve and promote the institution's intellectual memory. Today's law school repositories have matured to include many more types of materials than simply faculty law review and journal articles. Librarians are ideally poised to capture, organize and preserve their institution's history in this new and powerful showcase.

Citation Advantage Of Open Access Legal Scholarship, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson

James M. Donovan

In this study focusing on the impact of open access on legal scholarship, the authors 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 fifty-eight percent more citations than non–open access writings of similar age from the same venue.

Back Away From The Survey Monkey!, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

In an environment of too many—and too many ill-designed—surveys, our twin aims should be to reduce the number of surveys overall and to improve the quality of those that do circulate. This burden falls on both those who distribute questionnaires—to make them as efficient as possible—and those answering—to decline to participate in any project that shows signs of unthoughtful design, thereby forcing surveyors to “up their game.” Good surveying, a difficult task in the best of circumstances, becomes even more complicated when pushed through the favored medium of the online discussion list (commonly called a listserv), a choice that can …

Libraries As Doppelgängers: A Meditation On Collection Development, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Debates about the balance between electronic and paper resouces typically employ points on economics or patron access. That line of argument can be shown to depend upon an understanding of libraries as reducible to their contents. After showing that this premise must be discarded as logically inconsistent with the broader assertions made in favor of digital materials, the question is posed as to what qualities of libraries are not reducible to the materials they contain. The attractiveness of digital content, even if conclusive from a merely economic perspective, may still founder on the intrinsic properties of library qua "library."

One …

Current Awareness Alerts Make The Internet Revolve Around You, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Shares ways for busy lawyers to utilize tech-savvy methods to receive desired news and information.

Quality Online Legal Researching -- On The Cheap!, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Summarizes issues to consider when exploring the internet for free but reliable legal resources, and offers a table of links to federal and Georgia state materials.