The Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s faculty is ranked 30th in the country in scholarly impact, based on citations to their articles. In addition to the quantity and quality of their scholarship, part of the reason for the ranking may be due to the ease of accessibility of their works on BePress’ Scholarly Commons.
Launched five years ago, the law school’s Scholarly Commons features 12 electronic collections including faculty publications, alumni publications and five student-edited journals. Unlike Lexis, Westlaw and SSRN, articles on Scholarly Commons are available worldwide online without requiring an account or password. Indexed by search engines, every article is available to download.
Of the 71 U.S. law schools that host their own Bepress Scholarly Commons sites, CWRU School of Law ranks 13th in total available papers, 18th in total downloads, and 12th in downloads last year with more than 1 million. According to statistics available at Bepress, that puts the law school above or among prestigious law schools including NYU, Columbia, Cornell and Georgetown.
Milestones for law school’s collections include 662,659 downloads of faculty publications, 1,248,082 downloads of Case Western Reserve Law Review articles, 785,126 downloads of articles from the Journal of International Law, 172,787 downloads from Health Matrix and 75,047 downloads from the Journal of Law, Technology, and the Internet.
"Our repository, Scholarly Commons, uses the power of BePress to provide direct, free and permanent global access to our leading-edge and impactful law faculty scholarship,” said Joseph Custer, professor of law and director of the Case Western Reserve law library. “The sweeping availability to the wide spectrum of legal and interdisciplinary scholarship undertaken at our school compares favorably to the interest in the scholarship originating at the country's T14 law schools."