There has been recent listserv buzz about law review submissions this season. Jessie Hill has been blogging as well. In particular, people are asking questions about a new electronic article delivery service - Scholastica. The California Law Review and University of Chicago Law Review have announced that they will no longer accept submissions from ExpressO, but only via direct email or Scholastica.
Scholastica is different from ExpressO in one critical way: it costs $5 a pop to submit an article. It's unclear if Scholastic will offer a bulk pricing scheme to reduce overall cost - the CLR suggests as much. And perhaps the journals are switching because the Scholastica interface is better than ExpressO. But I have a suspcion that a driving force behind the switch is that journals want a higher barrier to submission than currently exists.
I attended a meeting of law review editors a year or two ago spoke with a number of EIC's. Everyone agreed that that volume of submissions via ExpressO was intolerable. This lead journals like the Stanford Law Review to reject all electronic submissions, other than via its own portal.
I'm not surprised that something had to give. A five dollar price tag will surely reduce the number of journals targeted submissions by faculty. Those dollars will add up quickly - especially if they're funded out of each faculty member's professional budget. (Not to administrative assistants and their supervisors: faculty may be asking you to submit articles one by one, journal by journal, to save money.)
It might have a greater impact on those who are not yet in the academy - and therefore won't be reimbursed the cost of submissions. Why only 'might'? Because for now, at least, Scholastica is apparentlly offering "economic hardship waivers" to "authors who are unemployed, students dependent on financial aid, and authors from developing countries." Applicants for such waivers are asked whether they meet current HHS povery guidelines. If nothing else, I expect Scholastica to cap the total value of waivers for each applicant. And I suspect that few legal scholars will qualify - Skadden, DOJ, and VAP salaries are hardly poverty wages.
I'm not sure this is wholly a bad thing. My sense is that authors now submit to two, three, or four times as many journals as they did fifteen years ago. This avalanche has been demoralizing to student editors. It seems to have led more authors to the dubious choice to submit work to journals they would never publish in - which strikes me as a really lousy thing all around. And I suspect - without any data to back me up - that it has only amped up letterhead bias. If I were a student editor facing 2500 articles and a 5% yield on offers, I'd certainly be searching for shortcuts.
What's the long term future for ExpressO? Perhaps ExpressO will have to raise prices to stay in the game. In the short term, at least, it appears that ExpressO may be underpricing itself out of the market.
Update: Mike Madison shared his thoughts about Scholastica and the future of print law journals here.
Doesn't Scholastica offer some benefits to law reviews in terms of preparation for publication of the articles submitted through it's system? I think I read where those in-house benefits helped push law reviews to switch. In effect, the law reviews may be out-sourcing some of their internal production costs to the people who submit to them. That might make sense in this budgetary climate with the decline of subscription revenues. There is probably more demand to publish in most law reviews than there is demand to buy those law reviews.
Posted by: Anon | August 06, 2012 at 05:29 PM
I remember that it wasn't so long ago that if one wanted to submit an article, he had to write and sign an actual letter, get the copies of the article printed, and then put them in individual envelopes to law reviews. The sheer volume of the work limited the number of submissions. It was, however, law reviews that encouraged the electronic submission. They apparently didn't like getting all the paper. They sold it as a more efficient way to take in the submissions. Now they're reaping the benefits or burdens of that approach.
However, isn't this the very same phenomenon we see in admissions? Not long ago, people applied to about 12 schools because you had to type the form and write 12 essays. Now, with electronic submission, one clicks a few buttons and the app goes out to 50 schools,with the result that schools are now looking for ways to wade through the volume.
Posted by: Matt Harrington | August 07, 2012 at 08:31 AM
>Doesn't Scholastica offer some benefits to law reviews in terms of preparation for publication of the articles submitted through it's system?
Indeed. Brain Cody at Scholastica gave me a walkthrough. It is a much more ambitious project than just article submissions handling like ExpressO. Through the Scholastica service, a journal can manage the entire publishing ecosystem, including communicating with authors, hosting working documents, and publishing online. My experience supporting the journals' work in our law library suggests that this service would be an improvement to the mishmash of Google Docs, DropBox folders, network drives, print proofs, and shared email accounts that student editors must sometimes employ. Though, no doubt, they'd also welcome anything that improves the slush pile.
If I understand correctly, this is their vision of open access publishing. A journal signs up on their service, the electrons flow, and at the end of the day the journal gets published online. The system, however, is flexible. Journals might still continue the print, opt not to publish online at all, or simply use as little or as much of the functionality available. The journal can pay for the service per submission or set it up so that the authors bear the burden of the service through submission fees.
Many scholars outside law rankle at the idea that an author would have to pay to submit an article. But, since legal scholars or their institutions already pay (ExpressO is relatively inexpensive, but certainly not free) and submissions are non-exclusive (encouraging the "avalanche" you mention), Scholastica may find a more receptive and economically viable market in the law than other disciplines. Well, maybe the jury's still out on "viable," but perhaps at least, "initially workable."
Posted by: Patrick Flanagan | August 07, 2012 at 11:31 AM
At $5 a pop, I hope this new system at least lets you see the status of submissions and maybe even change it. It's absurd ExpressO won't let you mark rejections.
Posted by: Anon | August 07, 2012 at 12:59 PM
How often does University of Chicago Law Review publish the work of professors who don't work at the University of Chicago? I'm not sure Chicago by its lonesome is going to move the market, since the chance of outside faculty publishing in the journal are pretty minimal to begin with.
Why pay $5 for a 99 percent chance of rejection in favor of someone at Chicago? And if money is now the barrier of choice, won't this just give an even bigger advantage to professors at the wealthier schools, i.e., won't this replicate letterhead bias?
Posted by: Anon | August 07, 2012 at 11:37 PM
In my fields, mathematics and philosophy, it is considered unethical to submit a paper to more than one journal at a time. Only lawyers would cook up a system involving multiple submissions, bargaining with editors, and most ludicrous of all, having STUDENTS (often a professor's own students) decide whether a paper is accepted for publication. How is it that all you overpaid law professors can't be bothered to edit law journals and referee submissions like the rest of your academic colleagues?
Posted by: Carl Wagner | August 08, 2012 at 01:36 PM
Who reads these things, anyway?
Posted by: Bill Farber | August 09, 2012 at 02:36 PM