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/
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for a very clear and helpful post.