TaxProf Blog gets announcements.

Here is an interesting one:

Cece Worley, a 3L at Georgetown Law and Executive Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, wrote to us to announce the launch of “Expecited.” The announcement says that Expecited is “a platform designed to make the law review submissions process more transparent and useful for legal scholars.”

Cece Worley goes on:

I built ExpeCited after experiencing firsthand how difficult it can be to understand what is actually happening during a submissions cycle. Authors are often making consequential decisions about where to submit, when to expedite, and whether continued silence from a journal means anything at all, yet much of the available information is scattered across spreadsheets, message boards, and individual anecdotes. There is an enormous amount of collective knowledge among scholars who are submitting at the same time, but very little infrastructure for turning that information into something everyone can actually use.

ExpeCited is my attempt to change that. The platform allows scholars to anonymously log their submissions and decisions and then turns that collective data into live information about journal activity, response times, offers, rejections, withdrawals, and pending submissions. Users can see what journals are doing during the current cycle rather than relying primarily on historical averages or isolated reports.

For an individual scholar, that means being able to answer practical questions such as: Is this journal actively making decisions right now? How long are authors actually waiting? Are other manuscripts submitted around the same time still alive? Which journals appear to be responding to expedites? How much time should I realistically request on an offer?

ExpeCited also includes journal-specific pages for over 200 journals, cohort tracking that allows authors to follow how similarly timed submissions are progressing through the cycle, and a community where scholars can exchange submission strategy and journal intelligence. The underlying idea is that the more scholars contribute, the more useful the information becomes for everyone. Currently, we have an active user-base of about 30 scholars and would love to have your colleagues join us.

Does ExpeCited work as promised? Does it work better than any other submission platform that might offer related functionality? I have no idea; I do not submit papers to law reviews. More important, I cannot access the ExpeCited website, because access is blocked on my university’s network. Cybersecurity reasons, I assume.

And one more thing, after the jump:

I am 99% confident that ExpeCited was built with AI and that the cybersecurity reason for the site’s being blocked on my end is that my university’s screening technology detects something amiss in its AI constitution.

Cybersecurity aside, however, here we have a good case study of a law student using AI for an educational purpose, if not necessarily a submit-work-for-academic-credit purpose.

I will sharpen the case. Here is a hypothetical question for anyone so motivated to consider:

Is a law student’s building and distributing ExpeCited with the help of AI an activity that should be prohibited by a law school “student use of AI” policy? That actually is prohibited by any law school’s “student use of AI” policy?

If so, why? If not, why not?

The AI cat is out of the bag. Is it among the pigeons?