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From the Volokh conspiracy comes another post on the law reviews in the US: The Timing of the Law Review Submission Process. In it, Orin Kerr writes:

Unlike most academic journals, student-run law reviews generally permit authors to submit their scholarly articles to many journals at once. When a journal decides to accept a particular paper, the journal typically gives the paper’s author a window of time in which to decide whether to accept the offer. It’s understood that authors use this window to try to “shop up” the article, requesting an expedited review from more desirable journals (more desirable for whatever reason — higher prestige, a particular school, etc.).

This is in contrast, as he explains, to the model where you go one-by-one to journals and wait to hear back from them. He goes on to explain the benefits of this way of doing things and why it is preferable (at least in the US):

This system may sound really odd at first, but it’s not a terrible way of dealing with a world in which there are hundreds of journals looking to publish the most desirable articles possible and thousands of authors hoping to be published in the most desirable journal. Requiring exclusive submissions works well in fields with a handful of journals, but it’s a lot harder in a field with hundreds of journals. (Can you imagine how many years it might take to run through journals until you finally get your offer from the Delaware State Journal of Labor & Employment Law?) Also, a grand “matching” system would take too much time: It may or may not be easy for authors to rank their preferences of journals, but clearly it would take an impossible amount of time for every journal to rank every submission.

I couldn’t agree more with the utility of the system in a market with hundreds of journals, as in the US. He goes on, by the way, to ask if the submission process has been speeded up as of late and what result that has had. It is an interesting question, but I wish to focus on other aspects.

The UK/EU system is based on the round robin approach of submitting, waiting for an answer, and then moving on if rejected. It can be an admittedly slow system. Some journals send it out for peer review and get back a response, at least an initial ‘could this be published response’ right away. Other journals take their time, and wait for the article to go through a full peer review process and then make a decision.

Some of these journals even make the decision to publish and start the editing process without ever notifying the author that they have been accepted, relying on the understanding that they haven’t submitted anywhere else.

As an author, I like the peer review process, and think that it is a valuable way to generate feedback and improve on articles. But this process can be cumbersome when trying to get a time-sensitive article out.

One of the things about SCRIPT-ed that I like and that I think is one of our strengths is the ability to make decisions and publish quickly. But part of the reason we can do so is because we are an e-journal.

But I am left wondering if perhaps there should be more competition between UK/EU law journals for articles, and whether allowing for multiple submissions could improve the quality of articles and improve the process of reviewing them.

This entry was posted Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 8:49 am and is filed under legal writing nerd. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.