9. Paul H. Edelman & Tracey E. George, SIX DEGREES OF CASS SUNSTEIN: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship (Green Bag, Autumn, 2007) Legal academia is undergoing many changes, from the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship to the increase in “post-doctoral” opportunities in major law schools. Many of these changes can be seen as a move to a more academic model of law school and away from the professional school model. Yet one way in which legal academia has distinguished itself from many academic disciplines is in its reluctance to embrace collaboration in the production of knowledge. We think that this is beginning to change and this paper is one of the first attempts to quantify the level of collaboration in law. Unfortunately we are limited by the availability of data to do a full-blown analysis as has been done in other disciplines. Nevertheless, by following in the tradition of the original work on ERD numbers we think we have made a step forward in seeing the direction of collaboration in law.
11. Traditional measures such as Impact Factor are limited (does not account for unpublished work or give proper credit to OA journals). Scholars are looking for other measures based on connections to manage the growth. SSRN uses a variety of measures (downloads, citations, soon to add Carl Bergstrom’s eigenFactor) so that users can “roll their own” Ranking.
14. >>> 10/11/09 9:40 AM >>> Dear Tom, Thanks very much for the quick reply. The UNH library is pushing for an open access policy that encourages faculty to publish in open access journals, giving reasons if one does publish in a commerical journal. It also wishes to set up a university archive of scholarly productions, presumably similar to the ones at Harvard and others who have instituted such a policy. The library's motivation is primarily economic as part of a nationwide movement to pressure commercial journals to lower their subscription fees. Whether this will work I do not know, Some open access journals demand higher fees for authors. The big, well-endowed universities cover such fees for faculty. A problem might be to make sure that UNH does so despite other pressures on the budget. Best, Val
21. Paul H. Edelman & Tracey E. George, SIX DEGREES OF CASS SUNSTEIN: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship (Green Bag, Autumn, 2007) Legal academia is undergoing many changes, from the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship to the increase in “post-doctoral” opportunities in major law schools. Many of these changes can be seen as a move to a more academic model of law school and away from the professional school model. Yet one way in which legal academia has distinguished itself from many academic disciplines is in its reluctance to embrace collaboration in the production of knowledge. We think that this is beginning to change and this paper is one of the first attempts to quantify the level of collaboration in law. Unfortunately we are limited by the availability of data to do a full-blown analysis as has been done in other disciplines. Nevertheless, by following in the tradition of the original work on ERD numbers we think we have made a step forward in seeing the direction of collaboration in law.