What will be the effect of open access publishing on law journals’ income from commercial databases?
It can be argued that open access scholarship is aimed at different audiences than law firms and law schools, which are probably the primary sources for journals royalty revenue. Open access publishing makes scholarship accessible to domestic and international researchers who cannot afford the costs of commercial databases. A least in the U.S. and western Europe, where law journals are packaged in electronic databases with other resources regularly relied upon by practicing attorneys and academic lawyers, open access to legal scholarship should have little impact on royalty income. In a time of financial hardship, however, users may well look more frequently to freely available sources. I am wondering why law reviews are the target in this initiative when they are a relatively low cost item. Costs of physical storage aside, they are an inexpensive part of law library collections. It would be a better world if the high end items on our shelves were more digitized and affordable. Unlike
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- What will be the effect of open access publishing on law journals’ income from commercial databases?
