Editorial process : Springer Support (2021). To the best of our knowledge, our analysis is one of the very few quantitative analyses of these processes. 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. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. round 1""nature nature metabolism. We have also gained specific insights into how editors take their role in the peer review process seriously: despite automation of some administrative steps, decision-making as well as decision-communication remains in the human domain. I submitted a paper in a journal. It's showing under consideration for Editor's decision in Nature and under review in Research Square After initial checks are complete, the manuscript is assigned to an editor, who reads the paper, consults with the editorial team, and decides whether it should be sent for peer review. In the subsection above, we have shown for first submitted versions that the drafting of decision letters happens mostly for negative decisions. The manuscript and associated materials are checked for quality and completeness by the journals editorial assistant. English Editing - Editage.com | Editage.jp | Editage.co.kr |SCI Editage.cn |publicao de artigos Editage.com.br | Editage.com.tw |Terms of UseforEnglish Editing Services. 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. Yet, the digital infrastructure accompanies each and every step of the editor, supporting the editors tasks, which could not be accomplished in an equal pace and magnitude without it. 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. ~. Stage 2: Editor assigned. 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. Thus, it is rendered invisible as distinguishable component. If it goes for review, then it will be about a month before you get the comments. It has been stated that such infrastructures are also a source for negotiating innovations in peer review, as the system plays a major role in connecting and coordinating the various editorial practices (Horbach and Halffman, 2020, p.11). On the other hand, the editors decisions are stored in four different elements. The editor decides about opening and closing the external review (expressed by Manuscript Consultation Session Started (N = 5,816) and Manuscript Consultation Ended (N = 2,010)). Also, we have found that participants in the process (see Schendzielorz and Reinhart, 2020) are translated into roles in the digitalized process (see Plotkin, 2009) and implemented as person-IDs in the digital infrastructure, only the latter distinctly displaying the infrastructure itself as an actor. How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain the editors agency for administrating the process? The EiC may have seen merits in your paper after all (or a fit, if that was the issue). This is supported by the process sequence empirically showing regularities but being very open in principle. . Accessibility The logarithm was chosen because the time between stages is distributed skew to the left (see Figure 2). 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. 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). .png (2019). response letterresubmit, 3. - The focus on establishing agreement of at least the majority or the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires . They employ single-blind peer review, which means that the reviewers are aware of the authors identities unless otherwise requested by the authors. Surprisingly fine grained is the representation of the communication about the decision. 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 . Invite the authors to revise and resubmit their manuscript to address specific concerns. Given that our data set is situated and that digital practices are related and aligned by the infrastructure, we follow the infrastructures and aim at studying how they structure and reflect the practices of its users. While focussing our analysis only on the case of one biomedical publisher, we may infer some more general observations for this realm of research. However, digital infrastructures supporting peer review have been established to support decision making and communication in the process of publishing scholarly manuscripts (Horbach and Halffman, 2019), enabling the investigation of the corresponding new digital practices. 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). Confirm that you would also like to sign up for free personalized email coaching for this stage. (For one manuscript, no first version was present in the inventory hence, the difference between 14,392 and 14,391 manuscripts). We do this by comparing the model laid out in the patent for the infrastructure (Plotkin, 2009) with the empirical data generated by the infrastructure. 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. The editorial management system makes these different roles visible, by attributing person-IDs as authors, editors and reviewers to manuscripts. Editors often communicate their decisions with individualised letters, putting much effort into decision-communication about non-successful submissions, which may show how they acknowledge authors individual pursuits of crafting and improving knowledge claims. . and JavaScript. They can only choose to participate in it or not. As acquiring complete inventory data from not fully open peer review is very difficult, we used the hereby presented study to exploit more of the potential of the data. What does the typical workflow of a journal look like? How should I 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). These events document the time passing before a relevant step in the consultation or postulation, inasmuch as they control if editors, authors and referees perform their tasks timely. While Decision Sent to Author plays a major role (N = 13,933), we also find a noteworthy amount of Drafting Decision Letter Started (N = 1,949) and Drafting Decision Letter Completed (N = 2,421). While the potential exploitation of these process generated data may support the administration, it at the same time may also put more pressure on the editor, simply because these data can be shared and discussed with potential stakeholders of the publisher. 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. The editorial peer review process for a single manuscript version is investigated from three perspectives: the perspective which considers the sequencialization (which stages are passed in which order) of the process, the pace (how long does a step take) of the manuscript during the process and the magnitude (how many manuscripts go along a specific path). 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. Order of the process without and with noise reduction. Yet, given our limited reconstruction of the event history, we cannot confirm this hypothesis. 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. unfortunately, the editor dont respond about reject and accept. Journal Editor's Perspectives on the Roles and Tasks for Peer Reviewers in Biomedical Journals: A Qualitative Study, Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Peer Commentary on Peer Review: A Case Study in Scientific Quality Control, Peer Review Verfahren auf dem Prfstand/Peer Review ResearchReviewed. They enable, support or constrain some behaviours, but they can also make certain activities more visible and thereby more relevant than others, they pick and choose (ibid., 1). 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. 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. A significant number of events (11,866, to be precise) released by editors affect actors with none specified roles. According to Star and Bowker, infrastructures are used to enable, maintain and control collaboration among different actors (Star, 1999; Star and Bowker, 2006). Sorted by: 2 Usually they decide in less than a week after the initial submission. Yet, despite much research about biases in peer review, little do we know about the actual processes of peer review, and even less so about new practices and technologies supporting peer review (Jubb, 2015, p.13). What does a quick change from 'Under consideration' to 'Decision made Can I ask the editor to publish a withdrawn manuscript after acceptance? Recently Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) provided a scheme for analysis of peer review with special regard to its control function in a decision-making process for the distribution of scarce resources. The following decision types are available: Reject; Major revision; Minor revision; Accept; Decisions are communicated to the corresponding author in a formal letter, along with reviewer feedback and any other requirements from the . While the data explored do not allow for mining reviewers recommendations, and the data in this article say little about how editors deal with data about reviewers or authors, it does document well the various steps taken by the editors to reach to both authors and reviewers, to communicate and prepare selections and decisions. This indicates, that administratively, the ongoing process is only indirectly affected by the reviewers recommendations, but directly affected by the editors decisions. Administrative work at journals then comprises, for instance, the handling and coordination of manuscripts (ibid.). Please note, this decision must be made at the time of initial submission and cannot be changed later. 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. Careers, Unable to load your collection due to an error, This article was submitted to Scholarly Communication, a section of the journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. Empirically, a panoply of orders occur in the manuscript histories, which means that for most of the stages, it is not predetermined in the systems implementation what happens next in the process. Your manuscript entitled "xxxxxxxxx" has now been seen again by our original reviewers, whose comments are appended below. The numbers indicate, how often a specific decision is reached for the respective version (the in-degree of the node). In the patents process flow chart (see Figure 3), only 17 entities occur: start and end, six process items, four decisions, three documents and two storage operations. What does manuscript under editorial consideration mean? Also, it shows that there must exist parallel sub-processes (e.g., communication with different reviewers), which must, by construction, have been projected onto one timeline in the history dataset we were provided with. This could indicate two possibilities. Events after decision with multiplicity and median duration show that editors thoroughly communicate about negative decisions. The identical numbers for both events indicate that they are released upon acceptance of the reviewer. 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). But instead, decision making and communication at the concrete journals under investigation clearly remain in the human domain. The only aspect, for which we could not clearly reject the potential automated decision making was the Initial Quality Controlsupposedly a check for a correctly completed submission form. GUID:EFC9DCE3-3C9C-46E8-B28A-8E8EFE53517D, editorial management systems, peer review, process generated data, digital transformation of scholarly publishing, digital infrastructure. The two additional source and target nodes make start and end of the process visible. . If we rule out automated decision making (which we elaborate on later in this text). We thank Taiane Linhares and Nikita Sorgatz for help with data preparation. This service is available to authors at the time of decision or at a later time. The production process after acceptance, however, was very annoying and involved a lot of back and forth with Nature's production team, which also caused a rather long delay between acceptance and publication. Also, Manuscript Transferred (N = 995), Manuscript Ready for Publication (N = 1,705) and Manuscript Sent To Production (N = 1,694) are events covering the transfer of publications after the review process was completed, referring to their relationship with the publishing house and their facilities. More information about the manuscript transfer service can be found here. The preliminary analysis of events indicates that the editorial management system adapted in our case represents these activities with ample differentiation. While they draw in their examples from grant peer review, they explicitly claim their depiction to enable comparative analyses of different peer review processes along the elements of a minimal process: postulation, consultation, decision and administration. HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help Before the decision, basically two things can happen (see Figure 5). In the second section of the results, we aim at tracing the order of the events in the editorial management system. How long do editor decisions take at Science/Nature? 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. Following her doctorate, she has worked as an editor, freelance writer and communications expert and advisor . 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. Picking the right philosophy of life is a vital decision, write Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary and Daniel A. Kaufman - whether your a Stoic, an Existentialist of an Aristotelian. Editor assigned Editor Declined Invitation Decision Letter Being Prepared "Decision in Process" 4.Reviewer (s) invited 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. Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. The categorization table is attached as supplementary material to this paper. By exploring process generated data from a publishers editorial management system, we investigate the ways by which the digital infrastructure is used and how it represents the different realms of the process of peer review. On the other hand, Initial QC failed does not happen so very often and manuscripts facing this stage must have something special with them. The editors of the receiving journal will take the reviews into account when making their decision, although in some cases they may choose to take advice from additional reviewers. Your revised manuscript should be submitted using the link provided in the decision email, and not as a new manuscript. 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. Learn more. For our analyses, only the internal representation of the process in the systems database was used, we did not investigate the frontend of the editorial management software. .. . The editorial management system however, does not only record which actor with which role releases or triggers an event. The status 'Decision started' indicates that the peer review process for your manuscript is complete and the paper is now with the editor. Hence, peer review processes at scholarly journals can be perceived as community work with the aim to establish consistent and sustainable networks between all actors involved. At the contrary, however, events triggered by authors and referees only affect events with actors assigned the same role. Such claims are difficult to make given the limitations many studies on editorial peer review face. In return, authors and reviewers experience less surveillance by the system, because only few formalized actions are recorded from them, because the system is clearly editor-centred. Moreover, infrastructures can be seen as structures emerging from situated knowledges, a term coined by Haraway (1988) with regard to people and communities with partial perspectives. With regard to roles and activities of the editor, there is support as well as control by the infrastructure. sciencenature - LetPub - Scientific Journal Selector | Nature Energy Reconstructing the processes applying social network analysis, we found that the individual steps in the process have no strict order, other than could be expected with regard to the software patent. There are certainly technological and organizational models in play fundamentally altering the role models of both reviewers and editors. [CDATA[// >Boris Johnson Backs $129 Billion HS2 U.K. Rail Plan Despite Rising Costs The .gov means its official. How do I write an inquiry to the editor about my manuscript's current status? 1124. Share Improve this answer Follow answered Jul 2, 2014 at 10:14 user18118 21 1 Add a comment 0 Accordingly, our process elements are strongly linked by the first couple of passage points, because they indicate states of transition. Nature (journal) - Wikipedia Answer: It is clear from the status descriptions that your revised manuscript was sent for peer review again. Our results may inform future studies and allow for making more detailed observations of the editorial process. The accepted manuscripts as well as those subject to revision are not processed further in this graph component. 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. 2002 on 21 Oct, 2016. German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Berlin, Germany, 2 The latter means to us that while the system itself is hidden from us, we use what we have access to: traces of how the digital infrastructure is used. Answer (1 of 7): Most submissions are rejected by editors without review, and this should be fast - perhaps, two weeks (?). Nature Microbiology (Nat Microbiol) We did not use a clustering algorithm, because those usually are based on cohesion or distance metrics: they regard those parts of graphs as different components, which are only weakly linked or distant from each other, whereas nodes belong to the same cluster component if they are strongly linked or close to each other. This is known as a rescinding. 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. For our last submission the decision took 25 days for which the editor apologized. Editor assignment or invitation Based on the topic of the manuscript and suggestions by the authors, an editor is assigned to handle the manuscript. In order to make such comparisons, we employed social network analysis with the events in the manuscript lifecycle as nodes which are connected through their relation in time. (2017). This category is comprised of Waiting for Editor Assignment (N = 14,261), Waiting for Potential Referee Assignment (N = 12,976), Waiting to Send Decision to Author (N = 5,796), Waiting for Revision (N = 2,612), Waiting for Author Approval of Converted Files (N = 898) and Potential Referees Waited too Long (N = 610). It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Manuscript submission under review | Student Doctor Network