The Citation Impact of Open Access

I pointed out in a recent post that the Brookings Papers has become open access.  Common sense suggests that this change should increase readership and thus citations to articles published in the journal.  Indeed, some recent research on law journals confirms this:

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.

The bottom line: If a professor is interested in raising his or her citation ranking, he or she should should prefer a journal with open access.