Submitting Law Review Articles via LexOpus

Posted on behalf of John Doyle (Washington & Lee) re recent LexOpus policy change for law review submissions:

"http://lexopus.wlu.edu has changed its policy on simultaneous submissions. Authors can select as many law journals as they wish, the system will transmit the work to up to 20 law journals concurrently, and when one of those journals rejects then an additional submission is made from the author's queue to maintain total submissions at 20. A list of participating journals is at: https://lawlib.wlu.edu/lexopus/index.aspx?do=participating"

Comments

[Matthew Reid Krell]

My question is whether LexOpus has a mechanism for automatically dealing with journals that just sit on a submission, neither making an offer nor rejecting. Or do I have to be proactive and decide how long it takes a journal to download a submission?

[John Doyle]

LexOpus doesn't have a mechanism for dealing with non-responsive journals. The one exception is that, as LexOpus can tell when a journal looks at the article, after two weeks of an exclusive offer, if the journal hasn't opened the file then the offer is converted to a simultaneous submission. Seems reasonable to allow simultaneous submissions to rise above 20 by excluding non-responsive journals from that count. Is there a suggestion on a mechanism? Consider a journal non-responsive if it hasn't opened the file in 2 weeks, or it's been 4 weeks since it did open the file and hasn't accepted/rejected?

[Alfred]

John--thank you for everything you're doing for the legal academy. I see you have a new citations study up, which is great. And I appreciate LexOpus. You're a national treasure.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

John,

I would say either of those mechanisms would be appropriate (or both). But if the point of permitting simultaneous submissions is to compete more directly with ExpressO, then LexOpus needs some way of making sure that a piece doesn't languish because of the intransigence of journal editors.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

Also, I want to echo what Alfred said. I placed my first publication with LexOpus, and I'm trying to place my second that way now. Thank you.

[Apparel Articles]

Thank you for a very clear and helpful post.