1. Using Open Access to Increase Personal Internet Presence
Presentation to Law Faculty
April 8, 2008

2. Benefits of Increased Web Presence
You’ve down the work, now reap the rewards:
Scholars want readers, and readers find texts through the internet. This is especially true of potential readers outside the ordinary circle of fellow law professors.

3. How Easy Are You to Find? Measure your “Online Identity”
Total responses for Google search of your name
Total on first three pages
Total on first three pages NOT about you
Are remaining results about you relevant to the way you want to be known?
Site calculates a numerical score out of possible 10 points, to tell you if you are “digitally distinct”

4. How Easy Are You to Find? Maximize visibility with consistency
Don’t use variations of your name (e.g., Jon, Jonathan, Jonny)
This includes the use of middle initials
Write abstracts (metadata) to create hits through keyword searching
Imagine searches you want to be the answer to, and put those terms in your abstract; sometimes this is all the search engine will have access to

5. For any scholar the bulk of web hits will refer to publications.
Consequently, the internet visibility of any academic will be a direct function of populating the web with his or her intellectual work product.
The most immediate way for scholarly work to appear on the web is to house them in open access formats.

6. Open Access Scholarship
OPEN ACCESS refers to the removal of pricing barriers to scholarly publications
Although search engines can sometimes let browsers learn of that your scholarship exists in commercial databases (e.g., Google Scholar indexes HeinOnline), unless that material is immediately available they may not follow up and read and cite to your work

7. What Does This Mean For You?
Free online availability can raise readership and citation rates over 300% (S. Lawrence, Nature, March 31, 2001)
Open access publications are twice as likely to be cited in the first 4-10 months after publication, with increased odds months afterwards (G. Eysenbach, PLOS Biology, May 2006)

8. What Does This Mean For You?
The easiest way to maximize your visibility on the internet is to offer your scholarly work in open access venues
Open access not only allows free availability of the work on the internet, but also increases citations to your work which further raise your virtual profile

9. Open Access Outlets for Law Faculty
SSRN
Digital Commons
Selected Works

10. SSRN (LSN) SSRN eLibrary Statistics (as of 4/7/08):
Papers & Authors: Abstracts: 182,315
Full Text Papers: 145,966
Authors: 91,719
Papers Received in Last 6 months: 19,847
Paper Downloads: To date: 19,852,350
Last 12 months: 4,709,280
Last 30 days: 569,078

11. SSRN (LSN) www.ssrn.com Contents appear on Google
Some series are fee-based, others are free
Maximize the availability of your paper by submission to free (open-access) series, like our own Legal Studies Research Paper Series (edited by Dan Bodansky) :
Current contents = 86 papers
>7,029 total downloads

13. Submitting to SSRN
Forward your paper to Jim Donovan at
Include an abstract if the paper does not already have one
Submit at earliest time you are comfortable rather than waiting until after acceptance or page proof stage: Buzz from blog notice can improve your placement and article’s readership (e.g., Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog regularly reports on the latest SSRN uploads)

14. Submitting to SSRN
As you update the paper, revisions of the document can be easily exchanged for the original
SSRN counts your views and downloads, letting you keep track of how many people have indicated interested in your article

15. Digital Commons http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/
Contains faculty published works (and a whole lot besides)
Permissions managed by Law Library
Bepress works to make contents fully indexed by Google

17. Digital Commons Provides most reliable download statistics
Creates a permanent URL to scholarly works: No broken links to your articles!
RSS subscriptions let interested persons become immediately informed of new additions to the collection

19. Selected Works
Recently branded to reflect relationship with Law School’s Digital Commons
Personal, rather than institutional page, that can be created during ExpressO submission
Simple workflow to add content: no need to know html to create your page

20. Selected Works Proxy editors can be assigned
RSS and lists provide alerts to additions to your page
Can serve as a complete archive of your entire intellectual corpus
Contents can be imported directly from Digital Commons (advantage: permissions already obtained!)

21. Customize subject categories to reflect your research interests

22. Unlike links on private pages, articles in bepress products (Digital Commons or Selected Works) receive priority ranking in search engines like Google Scholar because of ease of indexing and presumed reliability

23. Summary
Open access increases uptake of scholarship by making it available to those most interested when they want it most
Three open access options for law faculty have been described: SSRN, Digital Commons, and Selected Works
SSRN for Working Papers
Digital Commons for Institutional Repository
Selected Works for Personal Page

24. The End