Services for Faculty: Publication Support

Getting it Written: Drafting and Polishing | Manuscript Review and Submission | Open Access Publishing | Faculty Publications Database

The Law Library provides a one-stop-shop for faculty to support the publication of manuscripts. This includes advising faculty members on obtaining copyright permissions for scholarship, reviewing author agreements, identifying publication options, assistance with targeting journals, selecting an appropriate electronic submission service and uploading papers. For any of these services, please contact Managing Research Fellow Sue McCarty.

Getting It Written: Drafting and Polishing

The Ryan H. Easley Research Fellows provide scholarly support to faculty members. The fellow responds to requests from individual faculty members for assistance with law review articles and other works of scholarship, including broad and substantive research, detailed citation checking, and editing for style and format. Research fellows are available to assist with editing, footnote creation, citation checking and formatting, and proofreading. While we try to meet everyone’s deadlines, it is best to give us as much advance notice as possible if you need work done in a specific time frame. Contact Managing Research Fellow Sue McCarty to request the assistance of a research fellow.

Manuscript Review and Submission

The Law Library will review author agreements, identify publication options, assist with targeting journals, provide advice on an appropriate electronic submission service and upload papers for electronic submission. For assistance, please contact Managing Research Fellow Sue McCarty.

Electronic submission services are available that make submitting papers for publication easier. Using these services eliminates photocopying, assembling, printing and mailing and provides rapid acknowledgment and periodic status updates. To facilitate delivery of manuscripts to law reviews, faculty members may submit scholarly works to law reviews submission services Scholastica, Berkeley Electronic Press' ExpressO and SSRN's eSubmission.

Your intellectual output is a valuable resource. The University of Maryland School of Law encourages its faculty to use the AALS Model Author/Journal Agreement to judge agreements received from law journals. All five student-edited journals published at the University of Maryland School of Law have adopted the AALS Model Agreement.

ExpressO

ExpressO is an online submission management tool that enables you to submit an article to multiple law reviews at one time. To submit through ExpressO, you will need to create an account affiliated with this law school. To do that, go to ExpressO and click on the link for “My Account.” From here, you can create a new account. Make sure to list your institutional affiliation as University of Maryland – Baltimore, and use your law.umaryland.edu email address. After you enter in your information and create your own password, you will receive an email confirmation to activate your new account. Sue McCarty confirms accounts on behalf of law faculty for ExpressO services.

To submit a paper through ExpressO, follow these steps:

Go to the ExpressO homepage
Click on the “Submit Now” button.
Select the manuscript file format (both Word and WordPerfect are accepted)
Create and verify the list of reviews to which your article should be submitted,
Upload a cover letter (if desired) and the article
Click finish

At any time, you can go back to “my account” and add information about yourself by clicking on the link to “edit profile.” ExpressO maintains a submission guide here.

Scholastica

Scholastica is also an online submission management tool that enables you to submit an article to multiple law reviews at one time. The Law School has a faculty-only institutional account with Scholastica. To use Scholastica, go to https://scholasticahq.com/login and click the 'Sign Up Now' button to create an account. You must use your @law.umaryland.edu email address to be recognized under the Law School institutional account. After you enter your account information, you should receive a confirmation email. Click the confirm button in the email and you will be taken to your account page within Scholastica. From here, you can start a submission. Sue McCarty confirms accounts on behalf of law faculty for Scholastica.

SSRN's eSubmission

SSRN's eSubmission is a free service that allows you to submit a paper to law reviews that allow electronic submission. The eSubmission service allows users to send customized messages to each journal, and to submit to different journals at different times. To use eSubmission, you must first include your paper in the SSRN eLibrary.

Visit SSRN User Headquarters online to begin the eSubmission process. To eSubmit a paper, please log on to SSRN User HeadQuarters and then click "eSubmissions" on the left menu.

A word of caution about SSRN eSubmission: it has fewer agreements with journals; it allows only a note to accompany the submission; it only accepts PDF files; papers are subject to review prior to delivery; it does not have a manuscript tracking mechanism; you cannot expedite submissions; it requires an abstract to be posted to SSRN; and, it handles only electronic submissions.

Steps to submit a paper through eSubmission, a service of the Social Science Research Network’s (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), are as follows:

Go to http://hq.ssrn.com,
If you do not have an account, create one using your @law.umaryland.edu email address,
After logging in, click on eSubmissions,
Choose the paper you wish to submit and click eSubmit, and
Select the journals to which the paper should be submitted.

Open Access and Scholarly Publishing

The Digital Commons@UM Carey Law showcases the research and scholarship of the School of Law. In addition to faculty scholarly articles and publications, it contains program newsletters, conference proceedings, outstanding student publications, alumni publications, and administrative reports. To submit a paper, please contact Managing Research Fellow Sue McCarty.

Faculty members are also invited to submit research in progress as well as papers already accepted for publication via the Research Papers Series maintained by the law school, under the auspices of the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), part of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Issues of the University of Maryland Research Paper Series are distributed by email to all members of the LSN. Although any faculty member may directly post a paper to LSN, for the paper to be included in the law school's Research Papers Series it should be posted by the library. If you are interested in contributing a working paper or an accepted paper to the next issue or would like to learn more about LSN, please contact Managing Research Fellow Sue McCarty.

If you would like to receive email distributions from the Legal Scholarship Network or Economics Research Network, you may sign up by filling out a form online.

Faculty Publications Database

The Library maintains the publications portion of the faculty database for the law school's website. This database includes scholarly publications by faculty, and items display on both the faculty member's web page, and, if recent, on the Recent Faculty Scholarship page. Items are included from each month's Publications list distributed by the Dean's Office, but if you do not see your publication on the web, please send the information to Managing Research Fellow Sue McCarty for inclusion.