Publishing on IPWatchdog & Contribution Guidelines

IPWatchdog.com has been publishing online continuously since 1999. As a result, we enjoy excellent search engine ranking and placement, with articles immediately becoming indexed by the major search engines used today, including Google. We also work to index all of the articles we publish with LinkedIn, we publish a free daily newsletter received by our most dedicated readers, and our weekly podcast is available through all major platforms and on our YouTube channel. Our approach to publishing and promoting articles and having them easily found and freely read by anyone and everyone is why IPWatchdog.com is the top source intellectual property news, information, and content in the world, with nearly 1.1 million different, unique individuals visiting IPWatchdog.com in 2024 alone.

In short, if you want to build a reputation as an authority, if you want people to actually find and read your articles, if you want potential clients and industry thought leaders to know what you think and take you seriously, you need to be publishing with IPWatchdog.com! After all, it takes the same amount of time to write an article that no one will find and read, so why not publish with IPWatchdog.com instead?

Guidelines

We are always happy to consider guest contributions for publication from sponsors and partners who have expertise in any area of Intellectual Property. For more information on our publication policy, see IPWatchdog’s New Publication Policy: No Paywall, But No Free Ride or contact IPWatchdog.

We do not dictate topics or viewpoint to guest contributors, although we are happy to suggest topics or areas of interest if you would like us to. Preferably, topic proposals should be sent to [email protected] to be vetted and approved prior to writing. 

Please search IPWatchdog.com using the search tool to make sure we have not already covered the topic or angle you are proposing.  

**NOTE:  To submit a Press Release please see our Press Release Page.

Articles will be considered so long as they are topically relevant to our professional audience within the intellectual property industry, which includes, but is not limited to, attorneys at both small and large law firms, executive and corporate counsel, Federal Circuit and Supreme Court Judges, and political figures, including Senators, Congress, the White House and many Administrative Agencies.

Important note and update: please be advised that once an article is submitted, through the editing process, and approved for publication, it will be published. After an article topic is approved and the article submitted, we will only go back to the author for major revisions. Minor wording changes that affect only readability/SEO are at the discretion of the Editor. We cannot pull your article once it has been scheduled for publication.

***Please do not submit an article if you do not already have approval/ clearance from your company or firm.****

If your topic proposal is approved, please make sure your finalized article meets the following requirements/rules prior to submitting:

• Please make sure your article is thoroughly copy edited prior to submission.
• Articles should be sent to us in a Microsoft Word document format.
• If you are not a native English speaker, please have your article professionally edited by someone who is a native English speaker prior to submitting.
• Be a minimum of 600 words in length, although we prefer articles that are at least 800 to 1,500 words. Articles should generally not exceed 2,000 words. With longer works, we can sometimes split them up into segments and publish them as a “series” more suitable for Internet reading, if appropriate, but this is not our preference.
• Must not be commercial or solely promotional in nature. Commercial or promotional articles will not even be considered. Authors should be objective and not involved in cases they’re writing about, unless the article is an op-ed and the involvement of the authors is disclosed.
• Be coherent, interesting, informative and pertinent to the readers of IPWatchdog.com. In other words, topically relevant and aimed at the high-level readership we attract, including attorneys, corporate leaders, government officials, judges, Staffers, lobbyists, scientists and others.  We view our publication as relating to all things IP (i.e., patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret), as well as to topics related to the business of IP, innovation, and technology. “Topically relevant” can relate to current events, an upcoming anniversary of an important event, or questions driving debate.
• Articles should have a clear storyline that can be followed with a start, a middle and an end that are cohesive, rather than random thoughts that are thrown together. We publish articles, not outlines.
• Articles MUST be factual, or if it is an opinion piece, it must be substantiated by fact, which must be referred to within the context of the piece.
• Articles MUST be correct. While we do not filter based on opinion or viewpoints, articles must be legally and factually accurate.
• Be original works. We publish articles that have not been previously posted to the Internet and are intended exclusively for publication on IPWatchdog.com.  This requirement is loosened when publishing executive summaries of longer pieces, such as a law review article, but even there we prefer the executive summary to be a derivative work rather than just publishing an abstract.
• Exclusivity and Copyrights. While the author will retain the copyright, we require exclusivity online. If you wish to publish the article elsewhere online, we ask that you please publish only the first paragraph or two with a “Read More” link hyperlinked to the full article on IPWatchdog.com.
• Footnotes and Endnotes are not accepted. In electronic form, footnotes are not aesthetically pleasing and are rather tedious to read.  We prefer articles with citations to have the citation included within the article and with links to reference materials already embedded in the article or in parentheses behind each highlighted word you would like linked.  We like to highlight the people, cases, companies, and products we talk about in our posts but would prefer to do so with direct links within the text.
•  If the article includes figures, the figures should be provided separately in either GIF, JPG or PNG format, and not embedded into a Word document. We will need copyright authorization for any graphics to be included.
•  In our experience, the title will dictate how many readers are attracted to an article. While authors are encouraged to suggest titles, the choice of the final title is up to the Editor. In the online world, a title should ordinarily be 60 characters or less. An unnecessarily long or non-descriptive title can and does negatively impact readership and search engine rankings.
• We require a short bio, which includes your company or firm name and the website URL you would like us to link your profile to.  We also like to include your LinkedIn URL (feel free to include any other social media URLs as well) and a professional headshot photo of the author (At least 300 pixels square with your face centered in the image).
• Revisions. Once submitted to [email protected], our Editor may be in touch with any substantive content changes. Please do not submit subsequent, revised versions once an article has been forwarded. If you have crucial changes to a previously-submitted article, please indicate via tracked changes that are clearly visible. Once an article is published, only very minor revisions will be made (i.e., no wholesale re-writes or substantial revisions will be made after publication).
• While we generally decide rather quickly, we need at least several days to review and consider an article for publication. Please do not shop your article around after sending it to us and without telling us.
• IPWatchdog cannot guarantee publication of any article, even if the topic has been previously approved. We also cannot guarantee publication within a certain timeline or on a particular day.

Never Behind a Paywall

Unlike virtually every other publication in the industry, IPWatchdog has never published articles behind a paywall. Indeed, we know that in many respects, IPWatchdog.com has become the publication of record for the industry, with many firms and individuals telling us they have canceled subscriptions to expensive news services because they view them as unnecessary in light of what we provide for free.

Our plan is to continue to put our foot on the accelerator, and to publish the best news and most accurate analysis and to keep that free of charge from the readers’ perspective. Truthfully it is hard to imagine any circumstances where we would ever change this core belief. We are fundamentally opposed to publishing articles behind a paywall and charging readers because, overwhelmingly, people will not pay for content. Whether that is good or bad is irrelevant. Internet readers simply do not pay for content in numbers large enough to make charging readers to read a viable business model.

So, ruling out charging readers to read means that we must monetize IPWatchdog.com in other ways.

Who Can Publish on IPWatchdog.com?

Anyone who is part of the IPWatchdog Community, is welcome to publish on IPWatchdog.  Which includes:

• Current of Former Judges and Government Officials
• In-house counsel members who are invited to speak on IPWatchdog program panels or who purchase tickets to attend our various in-person events.
• Any firm or organization that has financially supported IPWatchdog in some way within the last 12 months will be given the opportunity to publish articles on IPWatchdog. It’s one of the perks of partnership! This financial support can be through some combination of sponsoring webinars, in-person programs, buying banner ads and/or sponsoring our podcast.

UPDATED: October 9, 2025