If I had to choose between the explanation of the Evans effect as a recency/bandwagon effect, as Evans interprets it, or as an increased overall quality/selectivity effect, I'd choose the latter (though I don't doubt there is a bandwagon effect too). And that is even without going on to point out that Tenopir & King, Gingras and others have shown that -- with or without OA -- there is still a good deal of usage and citation of the legacy literature (though it differs from field to field).
I wouldn't set much store by "
skimming serendipity" (the discovery of adjacent work while skimming through print issues), since online search and retrieval has at least as much scope for serendipity. (And one would expect more likelihood of a bandwagon effect without OA, where authors may tend to cite already cited but inaccessible references "cite unseen.")
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