OPINION PIECE (wileyonlinelibrary.com) doi: 10.1002/leap.1105 Received: 3 January 2017 | Accepted: 10 April 2017 | Published online in Wiley Online Library: 18 May 2017 Improve student-edited law journals: Eliminate the acceptance period Stewart Manley S. Manley Faculty of Law, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ORCID: 0000-0002-3389-9679 E-mail: stewart.manley@um.edu.my Key points • The vast majority – and the most prestigious – of US law journals are edited by law students, without peer review. • Overwhelming numbers of simultaneous submissions contribute to over-reliance on author credentials for article selection. • Authors ‘trade up’ by leveraging offers to publish with higher-ranked journals. • Law journals should learn from literary reviews, which expect immediate accept- ance of offers. • The elimination of acceptance periods would reduce simultaneous submissions and optimize matching between manuscripts and journals. INTRODUCTION For most scholars, peer review is a necessary and valuable step to publishing research in high-quality academic journals. Submis- sions to peer reviewed journals are exclusive; only after a manu- script is rejected can an author submit it elsewhere, and if it is accepted, the journal will expect to publish it. These practices are largely turned upside-down at oft-criticized US student-edited law journals (Liptak, 2013). Almost without exception, these jour- nals do not use peer or faculty review. Instead, students alone, with at most 2 years of law school experience, select and edit articles, leading to ‘an embarrassing situation deserving the smirks of disdain it gets from colleagues in the sciences and humanities’ (Austin, 1990). Student-edited law journals also allow unlimited simultane- ous submissions. Hence, authors can submit an article to dozens, and if they wish even hundreds, of journals at the same time. Combined with the ease of submitting electronically, simultane- ous submissions overwhelm student editors. To make matters worse, authors are provided acceptance periods during which they scramble to leverage – or ‘trade up’– offers to publish with higher-ranked journals. The more prestigious journals, seeing that the article has received an offer, assume that it must be of rea- sonably high quality and quickly prioritize it for review. The lower-ranked journals are often left snubbed and empty-handed. These factors (along with the lengthiness of typical law arti- cles) have obliged student editors to find ways to ease their bur- den while still publishing top articles. Their primary tactic is to rely heavily on author credentials rather than manuscript quality, leading to even more criticism. This piece provides a critical overview of submission policies at student-edited law journals and compares them to policies at lit- erary reviews, which also generally allow simultaneous submissions and do not use peer review. The piece suggests that law journals can learn from literary reviews. Unlike law journals, literary reviews expect immediate acceptance of offers to publish. A small survey undertaken of literary reviews and the experience of a legal journal that allows simultaneous submissions but requires acceptance of offers, the highly ranked Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS), indicate that authors in both fields respect immediate acceptance policies. Eliminating acceptance periods at law journals would argu- ably transform submissions at student-edited law journals. Authors would be forced to only submit to journals in which they would be pleased to be published (as scholars in other fields do). Put another way, eliminating the acceptance period would optimize matching between journals and manuscripts. Student editors would also receive fewer submissions, giving them more time to focus on manuscript quality. Editors would be encouraged to review manu- scripts more carefully, knowing that every manuscript to which an offer was extended would be published. Learned Publishing 2017; 30: 245–250 www.learned-publishing.org © 2017 The Author(s). Learned Publishing © 2017 ALPSP. 245