Reputational Scores: Yet Another Idea for Reforming the Law Review Submission Process

Like a lot of others out there, I find the expedite game quite distasteful.  Also like some others, I've been tossing around some ideas for fixing it.  Some recent ideas from others include having faculty publish only in their home institution's journal, limiting the number of simultaneous submissions, or using exploding offers.    

My very tentative idea is this: the "E Score."  Suppose that Scholastica created and published a score for each author that indicated the number of expedite requests made per article.  If you submit to 50 journals and get an offer from the 50th ranked journal, and then expedite to the other 49, you’d have an E Score of 49.  If you then received an offer from the 49th ranked journal and expedited to the other 48, your E Score would jump to 97.  If you submitted two additional articles the following year and accepted offers on both without any expediting, then your E Score would drop to 32.3 (97 total expedites over 3 articles).

Other scores could be created as well.  Perhaps a “D Score”—for declinations per article. If you decline a publication offer, your D Score goes up and editors will understandably be a little less likely to invest their time reviewing your work.  There are good reasons for declinations, of course, two of the most common being copyright agreements and the time of publication.  The copyright problem could be solved if journals would state up front (and on Scholastica) what the copyright terms are.  The time of publication issue is harder to solve, but my sense is that most of us accept that our articles will show in print and online sometime within 12 to 15 months.  If the journal were to pledge up front (i.e., on Scholastica) that publication will occur within 18 months (or whatever), that would solve most of the publication problem.  For authors in the uncommon situation of wanting an article in print sooner, well, an increased D score is the cost of doing business in that way.  Of course, one must not forget that all authors would have D Scores as well.  So while an increase in your D Score is not welcome, the real question is how your score compares to the norms in the community.  If I’m wrong about timing and lots of scholars focus on it, then D scores should reflect that. 

Finally, it might also be useful to create a “W Score”—for withdrawals per article.  There’s nothing wrong about withdrawing, of course.  If you submit to 50 journals and get an offer on the first day, then you obviously will withdraw the submission from the other 49 and you’d have a W Score of 49.  What the W Score tells the world is how broadly you submit.  Is submitting to 50 journals a lot?  I don’t know, but that’s a benefit of a score. No judgment, just data.  If you are out of line with regard to the norms in the community, you are likely to be less successful in the community.

These scores would not only benefit journals.  They’d benefit authors as well.  Suppose you accept an offer from a journal ranked 100.  Not your dream placement, but it’s  perfectly decent and most of all, you just want to get the article in print and move on to your next project.  Still, you might feel a bit of silent judgment from others, particularly those who tend to publish in higher ranked journals. A low E Score is a way to push back against the judgers.  A low E Score tells the world, “I don’t expedite, so think twice before assuming that my article is not worthy of a higher ranked journal. Just read it and decide for yourself.” 

I would make all these scores public and searchable on Scholastica.  But this, of course, invites a concern: Scholastica would first have to be talked into this and it might reasonably worry that the idea might turn off authors, sending them to a new submission company (or creating cause for a new company to be created).  I think the easiest way to resolve this would be for the AALS to enter into an agreement with Scholastica—something on the order of 5 years for so.  In return for Scholastica’s creation and maintenance of scores, the AALS pledges that, during the 5 year term, professors at member schools will only submit through Scholastica and journals at member schools will only accept submissions through Scholastica.

There is one last, and crucial, question: will reputation scores matter to journal editors?  I’ve assumed thus far that journals would hesitate to read and make offers on work by serial expediters.  But is this true?  I frankly don’t know.  It is undoubtedly true for some journals and for some abusive authors (most journals have a type of internal blacklist, I suspect), but I can’t say for sure beyond that.  I’d be very eager to hear from editors on this. If an established author had an E Score of 0 (meaning that the author would very likely accept your offer), would that affect, and by how much, your review process?