Does scholastica transfer money to law reviews?

Hi Ronen!

To answer you question: Scholastica does not transfer money to law reviews because they decide to use Scholastica for their submissions.

When a law review decides to use Scholastica for their submissions, they do it because they receive an integrated review system at no cost to the journal that allows them to accept submissions, manage the review process, track publication offers, centralize file versions, and (optionally) publish open access content to the web. This is a direct benefit to journals, most of which lack budgets to purchase manuscript submission software.

For more information on how Scholastica benefits law journals, you can check out this blog post: 6 Specific Ways Scholastica Helps Legal Scholarship.

All of that said, could you say more about why accepting money would lead to unfairness? Many journals outside of law reviews charge submission fees as a source of revenue, and there doesn't seem to be a sense in the academic community that these submission fees hurt the review quality or lead to any unfair practices (you can read an interesting discussion on submission fees here. It seems like even when no submission fees are charged, if a journal does not "seriously consider the paper" then that is a problem, and adding a submission fee as revenue for the journal would not make such consideration more or less fair. In fact, additional revenue might allow a journal to allocate additional resources towards improving their review process. Thoughts?

Hi,

Thanks for the prompt reply. Law reviews receive thousands of submissions every year. It is common knowledge that many of them do not review all papers, and even those that do - often dedicate only a few minutes per paper. Proxies, such as affiliation, are given significant weight in the screening process, instead of quality and potential contribution to scholarship. This is somewhat understandable, because law reviews are edited by 2nd and 3rd year law students, who might be unable to determine which papers are genuinely innovative. Thus, law reviews do not give serious and fair consideration to all papers. Under this assumption, it is clear why transferring money to law reviews based on the number of submissions might be problematic. People who pay the same submission fee will be treated differently. Law reviews will be incentivized to induce more submissions, but pay less attention to each. I hope that helps.