I’m very pleased to write that my latest article has been accepted for publication by several excellent law journals.  This was my first foray into the use of ExpressO to submit my work to multiple journals online and I must say, it was much easier than the old way.

Pros: submit to multiple journals simultaneously for a reasonable fee; easily search for and target journals that are a good match for your publication subject matter; utilize the service to alert journals once you have an offer to publish and request expedited review of your article, all electronically

Cons: it is always difficult to gauge the interest that an article might receive and the shotgun approach with ExpressO is almost too easy.  I received an offer almost immediately from one journal, which provided me with a very short period to accept or decline.  My ultimate decision to let that offer pass before I received offers from other journals caused me no small amount of distress.

On the balance: ExpressO is a great service and had it been available to me when I was a law student, I might have been more proactive about submitting my work for publication.  I still believe that some of the articles that I wrote as a student were among my best work and I regret that I didn’t pursue publication more actively.

Among my offers to publish, I finally accepted the one made by the John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law.  The decision to choose between that journal and several others was a difficult one, so I relied upon the advice of some of my former law school professors.  I also reviewed the Law Journals: Submissions and Ranking database generated by Jack Bissett at Washington and Lee University School of Law.  The database offers a sort of ranking of law journal prestige, based upon several factors, including how often articles in each journal are cited by others.  It is fairly user friendly, once you figure out how to navigate the syntax.

My article, Fifteen Years of Fame: The Declining Relevance of Domain Names in the Enduring Conflict between Trademark and Free Speech Rights will be published in RIPL this fall.  In the meantime, I will post a working draft on my Selected Articles page.