Many of us are inhibited in our research in, and citation to, law reviews because we do not have access to the commercial databases.

Now comes a major step.  Law Review Commons, http://lawreviewcommons.com.  It is a free open access system with — law reviews immediately available.  It is part of Digital Commons Network.

While the biggest names tend to be missing (Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal), there are still many highly regarded publications included, and some of them go as far back as 1904.  Th site claims almost 150 journals (see blog description here, and listing by topic here.)

Of course the site has a search tool.

For example, here are some that are available.

• American University Law Review
• Boston College Law Review
• Fordham Urban Law Journal
• California Law Review
• Duke Law Journal
• Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities

I suspect that will be my first source when I am looking for an article or a citation.  It would be cool to to think that open access is going to reward these law reviews with extra citations — in fact it will happen naturally.  Indeed, the Digital Commons blog reports that “Our analysis found that citation growth rates of open access journals were 3.8 times higher than for comparable non open access journals in 2012.”