A new, free, law journal submission system will be starting operation in a week or so. '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.
Authors may in the alternative upload a work and make it generally available for offers from journals (presumably most suitable for works not yet ready for publication).
I would like to encourage law reviews to consider student works, and students to offer works to law reviews, so one feature will be that authors will indicate if the uploaded work is student authored and then the author will only see a list of journals that will consider student works (I've no idea how many journals that might be, as I haven't asked the journals for that piece of information yet).
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. The system uses hardware/software purchased from an AALL/Wolters Kluwer grant, for which I thank AALL and Wolters Kluwer. Software development is still actively under development so if anyone has any thoughts on directions this should take, please send them along.
You're welcome to look at the test version of LexOpus if you wish to. For more information see http://lawlib.wlu.edu/lexopus/about.aspx
John Doyle
Washington and Lee Law School
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