Legal Research

LexOpus, a Free Online Law Review Submission Service

Washington and Lee Law School has launched a free online law review submission service called LexOpus.

From the About page:

The system allows an author to submit a work to a sequence of author-selected law journals. An author may also, or instead, invite offers from any journal by choosing to indicate the work as open to offers....

An author is free to simply upload a work to make it available for general viewing. There is no obligation to make the work available to journals.

According to W&L's John Doyle:

LexOpus is not intended to be directly competitive with Expresso, as by design it will not simultaneously submit works to multiple journals. Instead, an author selects an ordered list of journals and the system makes the work available to each journal serially on a short-term exclusive basis. One of the main aims of LexOpus is to discourage what I see as the socially wasteful practice of simultaneous submissions....

Most law journals I've heard from seem happy to use LexOpus, or at least to try it out. The big question is whether or not authors will be motivated to use this system. On that, time will tell.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).