The Berkeley Electronic Press's innovative publishing model promotes high-quality, rapidly disseminated journals. At the heart of the bepress system are EdiKit®, powerful web-based editorial management software; an Authors & Reviewers’ Bank to offer incentives for timely peer-review; and a unique quality-rating mechanism for meritorious sorting of scholarship. Click here to learn more about how the bepress publishing model benefits authors, readers, editors, reviewers, and libraries.

EdiKit®
EdiKit is an innovative web-based system used to manage an article in its progress from submission to publication. EdiKit automates every procedural step in producing scholarly journals, from submitting an article to its review and final publication. EdiKit eliminates delays inherent in such tasks as mailing manuscripts and reviews; managing correspondence among authors, reviewers and editors; and bundling articles into an issue. Since the software runs online, editors can work from any computer connected to the Internet without loading any programs onto their hard disk.

Authors & Reviewers’ Bank
Many Berkeley Electronic Press journals employ The Author & Reviewers’ Bank (A&R Bank) to streamline and formalize the peer-review process, and to provide incentives for referees to submit timely reviews.

When a referee submits a timely review, he or she receives credit in the A&R Bank. Receiving timely reviews creates a debt. As such, the author who submits a paper must promise to review the work of others in a timely fashion. Editors invite debtors to review articles. A debtor who accepts the invitation must return the review within a stipulated time period or pay compensation sufficient for the editor to commission a review on an emergency basis. Debtors have a stipulated number of years to extinguish their debt before financial penalties apply. The A&R Bank thus formalizes the much-abused concept of implied reciprocity in the peer-review process, and provides proper mechanisms for the timely completion of referring tasks.

Quality-Rating System
Many Berkeley Electronic Press journals also employ an innovative quality-rating system that transforms the tortuously slow sequential submission model into an efficient parallel one. Here's how it works:

When an author submits an article, referees and an editor read the paper, as is standard with the peer-review process. They quickly (thanks to The Authors & Reviewers’ Bank) return their comments, and a publication decision is rendered. For meritorious articles, the big decision that bepress editors make is not whether to publish them, but where. The Berkeley Electronic Press journals are typically comprised of multiple titles congregated within a single subject area — a journal "family". For example, The B.E. Journals in Macroeconomics houses four distinct journals — Frontiers, Advances, Contributions, and Topics. The journals are ordered by merit, in much the way different levels of prestige are associated with different print journals. The quality-rating system means a manuscript submitted to bepress journals is actually under simultaneous publication consideration for multiple titles. This reduces the time from authoring to publication by many weeks — sometimes even years!

A Note about bepress Journals
The Berkeley Electronic Press launched its first journals in December of 2000. The goal of bepress is to produce rapidly-reviewed, high-quality journals. The evidence to date is clear - we have largely eliminated the delays in publication resulting from review and publication queues. For journals employing the Authors & Reviewers’ Bank to speed time to publication, the average decision time has been approximately 60 days. Over 90% of papers have been adjudicated within 10 weeks.

As word of the bepress model has spread, interest within academia has grown significantly. During 2001, Berkeley Electronic Press journals received 210 submissions. That figure rose to 464 in 2002. In the second half of 2002, our articles were viewed over 60,000 times. This represents a growth rate of more than 500% from the second half of 2001. More than 40,000 professors, researchers, and other interested parties are now receiving email notifications of newly published content.

Well over half of North American law schools now subscribe to bepress legal journals, including the top 25 as ranked by US News & World Report. Similarly, more than 200 major institutions subscribe to The B.E. Journals, including the top 20 schools. Our subscription base includes representation from 6 continents. Click here for subscription information.

The bepress journals have received further validation by virtue of their inclusion in EconLit, LegalTrac, ABI/INFORM, and other prominent indexing and abstracting services.

Commonly Requested Information

• Submissions: To submit an article to a journal, click the journal name and then click the Submit Article link at the top of the journal's cover page.
• Announcements & Updates: To join the email announcement list for a journal, see the Mailing List section on the journal's cover page.
• Subscriptions: For information about subscribing to the journals, see the Subscriptions page.
• Working Papers: A list of working papers may be found here.
• Coverage in Indexing & Abstracting Services: To learn more about which indexing and abstracting services cover Berkeley Electronic Press journals, click here.