The editor-in-chief is primarily responsible for initial receipt of the manuscript and assignment to an associate editor. 8600 Rockville Pike Some editors keep a paper for long time, more than 6 months or a year, without a decision and when send them a reminder message they do not reply or sometimes reply for the first time saying that . The patented process is implemented as software, which is then adapted locally to the journals and publishers needs, taking stock of the diversity of scholarly publishing. Before The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [a] is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. Drawing from the theoretical considerations explained above, we first present results regarding the different roles which the editorial management system supports and enables in order to understand how the governance of the process is represented and performed by the editorial management system. [CDATA[> If the manuscript is transferred, the original reviewer reports and identities will be shared with the receiving journal (with the exception of transfers to the npj Series and Scientific Reports). The event information was further enriched with year of submission, pseudonym of journal, and by (pseudonymized) data about the roles (editor, author, reviewer or none) of the person-IDs with regard to the respective manuscripts. This characteristic of the peer review process we must consider specific for this publisher, according to our data, and not a general feature, as the editorial management software could also be used otherwise. Editorial management systems are perceived as an infrastructure in this work. An integrated approach to management is embedded in Desautels' programs, including the redesigned MBA and PMBA, the McGill-HEC Montral EMBA, and the IMHL and IMPM. Journal Peer Review and Editorial Evaluation: Cautious Innovator or Sleepy Giant? Again actors assigned editorial roles stand out, because their actions significantly affect actors with other roles assigned. The data stem from the editorial management system eJournalPress and the focal data used here are the history-information of 14,392 manuscript files referring to 17,109 manuscript versions processed in the years 2011 and 2015 in the infrastructure for four of the publishers journals, which depict the manuscript life cycle from the infrastructures point of view. 2017-07-13 11:21. One possibility is that it will be accepted as is, which is extremely rare. . If your manuscript is rejected by the editor without the peer-reviewed process, please share with the community how many days you got the rejection email from the editor's office. Similarly, disputes on factual issues need not be resolved unless they would have altered the final decision to publish or not. The complete network is comprised of 72 vertices and 221,287 edges. In the patent, it says: A users role includes one or more of the following relationships between the manuscript and the associated person: author, editor, associate editor, reviewer, or staff member. (Plotkin, 2009 p.5). Depending on the journal, the assignment may be done by technical staff, the journal's chief editor, or automatic by submission category or author suggestion. Many researchers, reviewers and editors do have opinions about the roles and responsibilities of both editors and reviewers (Glonti et al., 2019), some of which contradict each other (Glonti et al., 2019, p.1). 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. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication. Peer reviewers are assigned to manuscripts, reviewers recommendations are considered and the fate of a manuscript is decided about by the editor. The second possibility is the long decision path from Manuscript Consultation Started through external peer review to Editor Decision Complete. Some authors ask the editors to reconsider a rejection decision. The categorization table is attached as supplementary material to this paper. An example would be a researcher filling in a form in a web frontend including uploading a manuscript (activity/action), which the infrastructure would be recording as Manuscript submitted by user X (event/stage). At the same time, expectations that a stronger use of digital infrastructures would inevitably push forward innovations in peer review may be disappointed. Due to the specific work environment at the publisher, where editors are employed as full-time staff in a shared office space, it must be easy for them to communicate with each other bypassing the editorial management system, which limits the potential of surveillance through the system. Abstract: Symbiotic microorganisms are omnipresent in nature, ubiquitously associated with animals, plants, fungi, protists, and all other life forms including humans, ranging fro While the elements provided are not always easy to distinguish empirically, it appears plausible to assume that they may reflect different roles in that process. Making an editorial decision. Following an ethnographic approach to infrastructures, we reconstruct sequences of the stages passed by the manuscript, taking into account how long it takes for manuscripts to pass from one stage to another. Year Publication Started 2016 *Crowdsourced data. Also, the review-process is partly made transparent ex-post, expressed by the fact that published papers are accompanied by online supplementary material comprised of the reviewers comments, editorial decision letters and communication between authors and editorial office, unless otherwise requested by the authors. A pre-screening of our data showed that the first round of peer review differs from the subsequent ones. Such claims are difficult to make given the limitations many studies on editorial peer review face. This document provides an outline of the editorial process involved in publishing a scientific paper (Article) in Nature, and describes how manuscripts are handled by editors between submission. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. However, in contrast to the patent for the editorial process, where steps have a clear order, the infrastructure seems to allow for an open process: in principle, almost any event could follow any other, which leaves the responsibility for the process in the domain of the actors. In the event of publication, the received date is the date of submission to the journal where the manuscript is published. More specifically, we hence thirdly 3), also aim at exploring as to whether one can find traces of automated decision making, something which could more radically alter editorial peer review and scholarly publishing. These representations on the one hand relate to the effort and the diversity of activities that go into scientific publishing (Taubert, 2016), but on the other hand, differences in the representation of peer review activities may also point to recent tensions in publishing as events indicating oversight or control may be expressions of commercial interest (Horbach and Halffman, 2019, p.12). We found that the labelling of the events indicates that at least all elements of the minimal model of peer review processes are represented, that is, postulation, consultation, administration and decision. On the other hand, Initial QC failed does not happen so very often and manuscripts facing this stage must have something special with them. Internet Explorer). HANDBOOK: Keep calm and wait: A guide to understanding journal statuses, Keep calm and wait: A guide to understanding journal statuses. 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. Recent research into platforms (Blmel, 2021) has argued that novel digital infrastructures are considered as agents of change for scholarly practices by incorporating several functions relevant for decision making and quality control. Assistant Editor MDPI minor revisions5major revisions1030 For instance, 10,522 events triggered by editors affect referees. This led us to iteratively disintegrate the network by deleting the passage points. 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? We stopped disintegration at the iteration before the four different decision events Manuscript Rejected, Manuscript Revise and Re-Review, Manuscript Revise only and Manuscript Accepted fell apart from each other into different components. Professional Editor assigned Editor Declined Invitation Decision Letter Being Prepared "Decision in Process" 4.Reviewer (s) invited Subscribe and get curated content that will give impetus to your research paper. The editor is reading your manuscript and figuring out whether or not she wants to send it for peer review. . SHORT ANSWER. The manuscript and associated materials are checked for quality and completeness by the journals editorial assistant. At this time, the AE read and evaluates the. Though many agree that scholarly publishing and peer review are social processes (Reinhart, 2010), investigations about the processes of scholarly publishing and peer review are rare, given that persons engaged in these processes actively resist investigation (Hirschauer, 2010, 73). The two additional source and target nodes make start and end of the process visible. [CDATA[// > The reviewers further triggered Review Received (N = 8,672), First Referee Accepted (N = 2,766) and Review Complete (N = 3,222), the latter indicating that a consultation event has actually taken place. 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). But there is a significant proportion of events triggered by actors with no role assigned (see Table 2). If the editor decides to send the manuscript to peer reviewers, they will contact researchers with relevant expertise. The use of editorial management systems as digital infrastructures for the management of collaboration hence requires processual knowledge about the peer review process. At the same time, they emphasize a power perspective with regard to different degrees of involvement for actors, their role and participant status. (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed tens of billions of pounds for a controversial new high speed rail line linking London with cities to the north, despite soaring costs and mounting anger from his own Conservative Party colleagues.The High Speed 2 (HS2) development will become Europe's largest infrastructure project but it has suffered delays and criticism of its . 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. Since we draw from data of one publisher, we cannot make systematic claims about the usage of editorial management systems, but rather intend to generate new questions and perspectives for research in this area. If we rule out automated decision making (which we elaborate on later in this text). Your manuscript is already in great shape but please go through our guidelines below that specify the correct formatting of your final resubmission to avoid delays towards formal acceptance. We are able to compare the elements and events described in the patent (Plotkin, 2009) with its adaptation at the publisher in question, where the elements of the process could only be identified by taking event labels, performing actors and sequence of steps together. What does the status 'Decision started' mean? One of the core areas witnessing the introduction of digital tools is the realm of scientific publishing and peer review in particular (Jubb, 2015, pp.16). What does the status 'under editor evaluation' mean? How long does an editor decision take? We devote our program to one of the most scathing and insightful indictments of the modern-day corporate media, particularly their subservience to power centers and how they eagerly spread disinformation campaigns in service to that power. The editor and the editorial team discuss the reviewer reports, and decide whether the manuscript or a revised version of it could be published in the journal. But instead, decision making and communication at the concrete journals under investigation clearly remain in the human domain. How do I write an inquiry to the editor about my manuscript's current status? The original ideas and values attached to the system are expressed well by the developers of the technology, who, by aiming at facilitating the process of peer review, defined major entities and activities for administrating manuscripts. 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. This is known as a rescinding. At the contrary, however, events triggered by authors and referees only affect events with actors assigned the same role. Authors as well as reviewers have no possibilities to bypass the system easily, as far as we can see. (For one manuscript, no first version was present in the inventory hence, the difference between 14,392 and 14,391 manuscripts). Stage 2: Editor assigned. Before the decision, basically two things can happen (see Figure 5). We started our empirical analysis following the conceptual heuristics of Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020), who provided elements of a minimal and maximum model of the peer review process. //--> Once you have submitted your manuscript, it goes through the following editorial process: The journals editorial assistant will check that the manuscript and associated materials are complete. All Rights Reserved. official website and that any information you provide is encrypted Apparently, appeal plays a minor role with Waiting for Appeal (N = 355), Appeal Received (N = 358) and Appeal Request Accepted (N = 355), but with overall low numbers. Editorial decision making at Nature Genetics. This is supported by the process sequence empirically showing regularities but being very open in principle. Nature. My paper was published in a journal in 2021 october. . The editor contacts potential reviewers to ask them to review the manuscript. decision started . After the decision, four things can happen, but empirically, the four decisions can be divided into two groups (see Figure 6). The editorial process as depicted in the patent (from: Plotkin (2009)). The patent shows a limited perspective on the peer review process, rendering the system itself invisible as a component (see Figure 7). 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 . Also, Editor Recommendation Started (N = 431) was attributed to this category. That means, the first round is crucial to the manuscripts fate and, moreover, the preceding rounds might predetermine the shape of the process in the later rounds. Depending on the journal, the assignment may be done by technical staff, the journal's chief editor, or automatic by submission category or author suggestion. The remaining network has only 96 edges and a density of d = 0.02, and a core-periphery structure becomes visible (see Figure 4, right). However, when they communicated their decision to the Editor-in-Chief (EiC), who makes the final decision, it was decided to reconsider your manuscript.