http://LexOpus.wlu.edu is coming along nicely. Word searching has just been added for author, title, and abstract fields. After a couple of weeks of system availability 204 law journals have so far agreed to accept articles via LexOpus (the general U.S. law reviews that are not willing to are California, Colorado, and Wisconsin). Thirteen articles have so far been submitted, and the authors of six of those articles decided to hide them from public view.
No doubt common to many start-ups, there's a circularity problem, authors need to see other authors use the system and journals need to see quality submissions before anyone will get overly excited. So, I'd be glad of any help in disseminating information about the service to anyone in your firm/company/court/school who's inclined toward authorship. Here's a bit of a blurb for anyone interested:
LexOpus (http://LexOpus.wlu.edu) is a free online law journal submissions system at Washington and Lee Law School offering two services to authors:
1) Authors can make their articles available to all interested law journals, inviting journals to make offers. Journals are able to limit by subject matter the articles that they see as open to offers.
2) Authors can make offers to a specific list of law journals, LexOpus making on behalf of the author a short-term exclusive offer to each law journal in sequence. For non-peer-reviewed journals "short term" is one week. Author offers continue past each journal's exclusive period, on a non-exclusive basis, until rejected by the journal or withdrawn by the author, but any journal with an exclusive period always has acceptance priority.
Authors can choose to both make a work "open to offers" and also to submit to specific journals, or do one or the other. As the system does permit uploading of revisions authors might make working papers open to offers and then, if no acceptable offers have been received, when the finished work is available submit that version to specific law journals.
Authors can suppress their work from public view if that's desired.
John Doyle
Washington and Lee Law School
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