While these technical adaptations reflect the processual or organizational demands, they may also create novel arenas for monitoring and control neither foreseen by the developers nor by organizational professionals of peer review work. (Manuscript under submission->Manuscript received)->Editor assigned->Manuscript under consideration->Editor Decision StartedDecision sent to author->Waiting for revision, ->Revision receivedManuscript #A1Manuscript under submission->Manuscript received->Editor assigned->Manuscript under consideration->Editor Decision Started, . Editorial management systems are perceived as an infrastructure in this work. In the second section of the results, we aim at tracing the order of the events in the editorial management system. If an appeal merits further consideration, the editors may send the authors' response or the revised paper to one or more reviewers, or they may ask one reviewer to comment on the concerns raised by another reviewer. We then continue by presenting major outcomes of the study, followed by a discussion about the editorial processes mediated by editorial management systems, and the role of automated decision making. While there are similarities between the different ways of using peer review, peer review for manuscript evaluation is specific in the way it is embedded within the organization of scholarly journals (Hirschauer 2004). Research suggests that editorial management systems as digital infrastructures are adapted to the local needs at scholarly journals and reflect main realms of activities. They can only choose to participate in it or not. For this purpose, we use network analysis: the vertices represent the stages and a (directed) edge is drawn from one stage to another when it is directly following in one items history. All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. The accepted manuscripts as well as those subject to revision are not processed further in this graph component. However, we decided to restrict our analysis of the sequence of stages to the 14,391 first-version manuscripts with 206,896 events to avoid obfuscation of the prototypical process by manuscript versions with a past.
- Given the administrative responsibilities of the editors, it is plausible that some of these events refer to quality or process control related activities such as setting up automated mailings without a call for action. Upon transfer, if the manuscript is assessed by the receiving journal to be a good fit and technically sound, it may be accepted without further review. In order to get more insights which kinds of events are represented by the editorial management system inside the above mentioned core component with 48 nodes, and adapted by the publisher, we analysed their frequency for the whole dataset and tried to categorize them according to the heuristic provided by Schendzielorz and Reinhart. Currently there is so far no systematic analysis of the structure of practices in the peer review process. These values and criteria can, for instance, be captured by studying aims and means of the patent (Plotkin, 2009) which serves as the technological basis for the editorial management system from our investigation. on 21 Oct, 2016. Confirm that you would also like to sign up for free personalized email coaching for this stage. How to write an email to the editor inquiring about the current status of my paper? This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). To identify important passage points in the network, we chose node degree centrality with respect to edge multiplicity.
LetPub - Scientific Journal Selector | Nature Energy Of all 11,103 manuscripts which make it to a decision at least in one round, the first submitted version is rejected in the vast majority of the cases, whereas manuscripts which make it through the first round, stand a good chance to be accepted in the later stages, as is shown in Figure 1. The reviewers comments and recommendations are supposedly stored in the database at other places, but their content is not present in the manuscript histories they only appear as Review Received. The multiplicity of edges expresses how often its ends occur in direct sequence in the whole dataset, that means, for all first version manuscripts together.
PLOS Sustainability and Transformation The editor contacts the author with the decision. The edge widths show, how many manuscripts experience the respective evolutionary path. Usually, the times vary from two to six months, but there is no fixed rule. 2022.6.13 Editor Decision Started Decision sent to author NZip for reviewers 2022.10.10 9All Reviewers Assigned109Manuscript under consideration In the context of the editorial decision about publication, the inventors suggest: Alternatively, the decision to publish may be automated based upon a ranking of the review decisions received from the reviewers. (Plotkin, 2009, p.5). On the other hand, it has been argued that editorial management systems support the editorial role and reproduce or may even increase the instruments to regulate, administrate and ultimately control the process (Mendonca, 2017). We store the data in our institute for 10years according to the Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3923602) by the German Research Association (DFG). resubmitnoveltyappeal, Resubmitpoint-by-pointresponse letterresubmitresponse letterresubmitresponse letternature, Proofreadingresubmit, Proofreadinglicence to publish, NatureNatureNature, wileynature science, Nature CommunicationsNatureNature CommunicationsPeer-review, Nature Communicationstransparent peer-reviewgetNature Communicationsget50%Nature Communicaitons, sciencenature. In contrast for our case, we hypothesize that the important things happen, where manuscripts differ from each other this means that the passage points tend to carry less information about the process elements. We only find Review Started and Review Received in this respect, but we have, based on the event history only, no information as to what the reviewers might have recommended. Also, there are only 29 directed links between the entities, resulting in a network density of 0.1, meaning that 10 percent of all theoretically possible edges occur. Innovating Editorial Practices: Academic Publishers at Work, Peer Review: The Current Landscape and Future Trends, Selection Criteria in Professorial Recruiting as Indicators of Institutional Similarity? Comparisons with novel digital infrastructures (and their implementations) for other publishers with different peer review models are necessary in order to more systematically judge or reflect on the influence of these infrastructural tools on innovation or stabilization in editorial work. R Package Version 1.14.0. If authors prefer not to make the review history of their paper at Nature Microbiology known to a new journal, they should not use the transfer service and they should make a new submission instead; the editors will evaluate the paper without reference to the previous review process.
Editorial process : Springer Support The given network cannot be completely chaotic, instead some structure must be there but need sharpening. But, as Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) recently have pointed out, editorial work can also partly be considered as administrative, taking into account that peer review takes place in an organizational setting (ibid., p.18). It also files who is affected by an event (Table 2). At the same time, expectations that a stronger use of digital infrastructures would inevitably push forward innovations in peer review may be disappointed. Editorial contacts can be found by clicking on the "Help & support" button under. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Assistant Editor MDPI minor revisions5major revisions1030 A Comparison of German Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences, Krger A. K., Hesselmann F., Hartstein J. After the decision, four things can happen, but empirically, the four decisions can be divided into two groups (see Figure 6). We did not categorize the source and target nodes as they were introduced throughout our analysis and not created by the system in the first place. Editor assigned Editor Declined Invitation Decision Letter Being Prepared "Decision in Process" 4.Reviewer (s) invited While these activities certainly would exist without editorial management systems, the latter makes them more visible and suspect to monitoring and optimization, because they can standardize editorial practices. The manuscript and associated materials are checked for quality and completeness by the journals editorial assistant. [CDATA[> Hence, we draw from a growing theoretical literature on digital infrastructures from science and technology studies and also from literature about processes and practices in peer review from the social studies of science. But there is a significant proportion of events triggered by actors with no role assigned (see Table 2). In this work, editorial management systems are perceived as an infrastructure supporting peer reviewed scientific publishing. Yet, calls for reforms in scholarly peer review have grown louder particularly emerging from critics about biases in peer review (Cicchetti et al., 1992; Harnad, 1983; Bornmann 2005). How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain the editors agency for administrating the process? As editors, our aim is to send you a decision that will give you the best advice we can about how to move forward to get your work published. On the other hand, the editors decisions are stored in four different elements. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, a drafter and signer of the United States . Consequently, the analysis shows how much organizational effort goes into what Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) have called the administrative parts of the peer review process to which this article pays particular attention. The idea to apply peer culture to science in order to protect the community of knowledge makers emerged in the Royal Society in late 17th century (Shapin 1994). Again actors assigned editorial roles stand out, because their actions significantly affect actors with other roles assigned. One of the most insightful critiques that has been published on this topic in years, our guest, Steve Krakauer, who is the author, has been around media for . Usually, the associate editor makes the publication decision (I'm sure the editor in chief can overrule this decision, but it usually doesn't happen). (2019). The description of the variables was mainly derived from the field names, their values and the xml-structure in the raw data and is given in Table 1. (2021). The use of editorial management systems as digital infrastructures for the management of collaboration hence requires processual knowledge about the peer review process. Talbots is a leading omni-channel specialty retailer of women's clothing, shoes and accessories. Thank you for visiting nature.com. In the majority of cases, at least two reports will be received which are broadly in agreement, making it possible to assess reviewer comments easily and reach a straightforward decision. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2021.747562/full#supplementary-material, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=data.table, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggraph, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-116609, Manuscript identifier with version indicator, Role of person acting (relative to manuscript). There are certainly technological and organizational models in play fundamentally altering the role models of both reviewers and editors. Accordingly, our process elements are strongly linked by the first couple of passage points, because they indicate states of transition. FOIA Moreover, the characteristics of both reviewers and editors are explored to a significant extent (Hirschauer, 2010, 73). The process elements postulation (P), consultation (C), decision (D) and administration (A), adapted after Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020), are mutually connected with each other, but seen by the infrastructure from the standpoint of administration. If that assumption is right, administrative activities might indeed more closely be intertwined with what Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) have called observational activities (p.19), enlarging editors control on the process, but also putting more pressure on this role. AEditor Decision Complete, BManuscript Revise and Re-Review, CWaiting to Send Decision to Author, DManuscript Rejected, EManuscript Revise Only, FManuscript Accepted, GDrafting Decision Letter Started, HDrafting Decision Letter Completed, IManuscript Consultation Session Ended. Many journals now rely on editorial management systems, which are supposed to support the administration and decision making of editors, while aiming at making the process of communication faster and more transparent to both reviewers and authors. These organizational and administrative practices may not always be related to epistemic values, yet they are an important part of scholarly knowledge production as scholarly journals are important sites for community building, safeguarding scientific quality and expectations to science in general. Answer: It is clear from the status descriptions that your revised manuscript was sent for peer review again. We concentrate on the core process now and delete the now isolated vertices, thus reducing the core process to the main component of the network with 48 vertices and a density of d = 0.04. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil.