Open access within legal academia provides a case study for the effective use of digital formats to promote scholarship. The presenters review the background historical developments in this field, and consider the benefits and rationales for providing open access to legal scholarship, including the special faculty concerns arising from SSRN and its relationship to the institutional repository. Results from the presenters’ recent empirical study of the citation advantage for open access scholarship in American law reviews will be discussed and placed in broader context of the benefits of open access scholarship.