Publishing Roles

Jun 14, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

When following your manuscript through from submission to acceptance, there are many different people and several different teams with whom you will come into contact. This can be confusing, to say the least!

So just who does what at each stage and, more importantly, who on earth are you supposed to go to if you have a question?!

The Managing Editor

That’s us – hello!

Sometimes referred to as an “Editorial Assistant” or “Journal Administrator”, the Managing Editor oversees the smooth running of the peer-review process. Our expertise is in the peer review-process itself, rather than the subject matter of the journal; we are the submission system’s “super users”, if you like. We keep an eye on everything to make sure that peer review runs smoothly and chase up anybody who needs it – authors, reviewers, even the editors sometimes! – allowing the academic editors to focus on the research.

You will hear from us every time you need to do something e.g., make some corrections, submit a form, or remember that you’ve got a revision deadline coming up…

The Managing Editor is your main point of contact for the journal during peer review, so anytime you have a question, it’s us you should email. Even if we’re not able to help you personally, we will know who to direct your query to.

The Editor-in-Chief

The Editor-in-Chief (EiC) is, as you would expect, the person in charge of the journal. He or she will be an expert with a broad overview of the journal’s field and will decide what content goes into the journal, how the peer-review process is run, and, to an extent, how the published content appears. How hands-on the EiC is differs journal to journal and EiC to EiC, but generally they will be the person making the final decision based on the recommendation of the reviewers and Associate Editors.

For most journals, it is best to get in touch with the Managing Editor and ask them to pass your comment or query on to the Editor-in-Chief rather than contacting them directly.

The Associate Editors

Mid-to-large journals tend to have a team of editors, rather than just one who deals with every submission personally.

There are many, many names for Associate Editors (on some journals they are even known as “Managing Editors”, just to confuse everybody) but they are the academic experts who aid the EiC by giving him or her their expert opinion and selecting reviewers for articles within their specialism.

A good editorial team of will have all of the niche subjects within the journal’s scope covered between them so that every manuscript submitted will have an expert eye cast over it, even if it’s slightly out of the EiC’s personal specialism.

How much the Associate Editors are able to assist with enquiries again varies, so The Managing Editor should still be your first port of call.

Data for Editors

May 14, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

An email lands in your inbox to let you know that an editorial board meeting is on the horizon and the editors want to see a report on submissions. And guess who has the joy of putting that together? Ah… it’s you.

If the thought of doing a submissions report makes you want to start banging your head on your keyboard, then get yourself a coffee and read our top tips for putting together reports for editors.

1. Know what the data you’re putting in the report relates to.

“Well, obviously I’m going to know what the data is about, I ran the report!” we hear you say – but are you sure? Is it relating to original submissions alone, or are revised submissions included in the figures? Is the date range relating to the submission or decision dates – or both?

For example, it’s not uncommon to find that the system has given you two reports which ought to be relating to the same set of manuscripts; but one of them totals to 78 manuscripts and the other to, say, 103.

When/as/if this happens, it’s important to understand why as you need to be able to explain this difference to your editor(s) – e.g., “the one with 103 includes revised submissions and the other doesn’t”.

Top Tip #1: Wherever possible, have a look at the raw data so you can check what has and hasn’t been included and always, always check that the figures on your charts match up.

2. Present the data in a way that’s clear and easy to understand.

Again, obvious, right? Well, not always. We’re all busy (understatement) so it’s easy to just copy/paste whatever charts and tables the system spits out in whatever format they happen to be in and consider the job done. But do they actually make sense?

Is the font that the system reports use clear and easy to read? Is the chart title something that your editor(s) will understand or just the name of the report that you’ve run? If the system’s presented the data in a pie-chart, is this the best way to analyse that data or would it be clearer in a bar-graph?

Taking a bit of time to reformat may be tedious but it will mean less confusion and fewer queries heading your way once the report’s been circulated – a win/win situation.

Top Tip #2: Try to view the report through your editor(s) eyes and present the data in a way that’s going to make sense to them.

3. Include information that your editor(s) will want to see.

Some editorial boards (and/or publishers) give very clear guidelines on what information they want to see in a report, but others just ask you to send them some data. If your editor(s) has(ve) been a bit vague, then we would suggest you include the following:

• At-A-Glance Statistics – If you’re using ScholarOne, these give a great overview of the journal including the accept ratio for the last year, how many manuscripts are currently pending, and how long the oldest manuscript has gone without a decision.
• Geographical Data – In our experience, editors love to see where in the world their submissions are coming from and what the geographical spread of accepted manuscripts is. So, unless your journal is very niche and only gets submissions from a small area, always include this information.
• Submissions Received by Month – We would recommend that (unless anyone’s specified otherwise) you provide monthly submission figures for a period of at least a year, if not two. This will give a good indication of whether there’s been growth in the number of submissions, as well as showing which periods of the year tend to be quieter.
• Editor Turnaround Times – If your journal is run by a team of editors, this can be a useful one to include as it will flag up if any of them are taking considerably longer than the others to get manuscripts to a point of decision. The Editor-in-Chief will want to be aware of this if they are!

Top Tip #3: Think about what data to include for your particular journal and your particular editor(s).

The Gentle Art of Reviewer Selection

Apr 14, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

Reviewer selection is arguably the most important part of an academic editor’s job; without good reviewers, the whole peer-review process grinds to a halt. So, if you are a good reviewer, I would like to take this opportunity to say, on behalf of editors and authors everywhere: Thank You!

What makes a good reviewer?

A good reviewer is somebody who reads the paper thoroughly, with an unbiased mind, and gives an honest opinion without being unnecessarily unkind to the authors or getting upset that their own work hasn’t been referenced enough (this happens more often than it should).

But the key thing that elevates someone to the ranks of a “good reviewer” is that they return their reviews on time. And, on the odd occasion that they can’t – things come up, life happens, it’s inevitable – they let the editorial team know. When it comes to the peer-review process, there is nothing worse than a reviewer who agrees to review a manuscript then disappears off the face of the earth.

For all we know, they could be busy crafting the greatest review academia has ever seen, but if it takes so long that the authors lose patience and withdraw their manuscript then it honestly doesn’t help anybody.

How do you find a good reviewer?

If you’re a new editor, you will probably start with your colleagues, your professional acquaintances, people who you know you can rely on to do a good job. But there comes a point when you have to take the plunge and start asking people who you don’t know so well – your colleagues aren’t available, it’s slightly outside of their specialism, they’ve already reviewed eight papers for you this month – so where do you begin to look for specialists who you’ve never bumped into at a conference?

1. The Editorial Board

If you’ve taken over the editorship of an established journal, then the Editorial Board should be your first port of call. The Board will almost certainly be made up of specialists from all over the world and often it is a condition of being listed as a Board member that they review a certain number of manuscripts for the journal. They are also a fantastic resource as they will know other experts in their particular field who they can recommend to undertake the review if/when they can’t do it themselves.

2. Your Reviewer Database

Again, this applies to established journals, but if peer review is run through an online submission system, then you will have a reviewer database at your fingertips. This database should be searchable by key word so you can, in effect, ask your system to suggest suitable candidates for you at the click of a button.

3. Advertise for Volunteers

We were recently talking to an editor who has a sign-up sheet on his journal’s homepage for people who wish to be considered as reviewers. He sends out regular emails containing the abstracts of submitted manuscripts and the reviewers on the list simply reply to volunteer for any they’d like to review. An unusual and ingenious tactic.

4. Ask Jane

Jane, or the Journal/Author Name Estimator, is an online tool which uses the title of a manuscript to search for relevant journals to submit it to, relevant articles to cite in it, and authors who’ve written on similar topics who might make good reviewers. In order to find these authors-of-similar-papers-who-might-make-good-reviewers, simply enter the title or abstract of the article in question in the box and click “Find authors”. She’ll then trot off to do a PubMed search and come back with a list of names and email addresses for you. If you’re struggling to find reviewers for a paper, we suggest you give her a go!

Online Submission Systems

Mar 14, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

Absolutely everything is done online these days and peer review is no different. If you’ve ever written a journal article, or been asked to review one, then you will no doubt be familiar with online submission systems.

They generally involve filling out a lengthy form, inputting a lot of information, and then attempting to persuade your manuscript files to upload. It probably won’t be surprising to hear, then, that a question all peer-review administrators will have heard at some point or other is:

Wouldn’t it be easier to just email it?

Online submission systems are used for a reason (and we promise said reason isn’t just to annoy researchers).

Tedious as it is to have to fill out all that information during submission, it is all information that we need. If you were to just email it, we would simply have to go back and forth via email until all the information had been supplied. Trust us when we tell you that it is actually much quicker to just fill in the form.

With the pressure for academics and researchers to publish more and more of their research, journals are receiving more and more submissions. Online submission systems which house all the information pertaining to each individual manuscript and automatically record when reviews and revised versions come in are an invaluable tool when trying to keep up with this demand for publication.

Successful journals these days are global enterprises with Editors and Associate Editors based all over the world. Having a system where everyone can just log in and see what manuscripts are assigned to them, what stage they’re all at, and whether any action needs to be taken makes this process far easier to manage.

Yes, but surely this could all be managed on a spreadsheet?

Those of us who’ve been in this game long enough will remember the days of running journals using emails and spreadsheets. This is a perfectly reasonable system in principle, however all it takes is for one email to go astray or for one piece of progress not to be recorded on the spreadsheet (easy to do, especially when working on a busy journal) and the peer-review process stalls. Online systems are designed to make sure that manuscripts can’t “fall through the cracks”.

The other great feature of online submission systems is that they automatically remind people when they need to be doing something. If you’ve used an online submission system as a reviewer, then you’ll no doubt have received reminders sent from the system when your comments are due to be submitted. What you may not realise is that the editorial team also receive automated notifications – a new manuscript’s been submitted and needs to be checked over, more potential reviewers need to be assigned as none of those already invited is available, a decision needs to be taken, etc.

The other (and arguably the most important) thing that the online submission systems have over spreadsheets is good old-fashioned layout. When we log into the system as administrators, we get an overview of how many manuscripts are in each stage. We can then check each stage and see how long each manuscript has been there and whether any action is overdue. We can then go into that individual manuscript and see who’s done what and when they did it.

But I’m really struggling with uploading my files and it just won’t let me submit.

Please send the Administrator an email and ask for help. Just because the majority of journals don’t accept submissions via email these days doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to email us. We are here to help and to do everything we can to make sure the peer-review process runs smoothly – most of us are more than happy to help you submit your article, advise you how to prevent the problem from occurring in future, and even to upload your files if you’re having connection problems.

Submitted my paper. Now what?

Feb 18, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

There is something of an air of mystery as to what actually happens to your manuscript once you’ve pressed that “submit” button. It seemingly goes off into cyberspace and you are left playing the waiting game.

These days, if you’ve submitted to a journal via an online submission system, you will be able to track its progress to some extent as you will generally be able to see what stage it’s at. The names of these stages can, however, seem fairly vague and almost worse than no information at all.

So let’s translate them. There are many different submission systems and the stages a manuscript goes through during peer review does differ system to system (and, indeed, journal to journal), so for the purposes of this post we’re going to look at the most common stages of the most common submission site: ScholarOne (formally Manuscript Central).

First Steps

Initially your manuscript will go through stages such as “Awaiting Admin Checklist” and/or “Awaiting Editor Assignment” depending on how new submissions are initially checked on the journal. These stages tend to be moved through fairly swiftly as they are just the editorial team checking that your submission is suitable for peer review and then deciding which of the editors will be responsible for it during the process.

Awaiting Reviewer Selection

This is the first stage of the peer-review process and your manuscript will be here until the assigned Editor has selected some suitable experts to invite to review.

Once enough reviewers have been selected, the manuscript will move on to the next stage. If only one reviewer agrees to review and all the others decline the invitation, however, your manuscript may well return to this stage while the Editor selects more. So if you log in to check on progress several weeks after submission and find your manuscript at this stage, it doesn’t necessarily mean that no action has been taken.

Awaiting Reviewer Invitation

This means that potential reviewers have been selected, but have yet to be invited. Manuscripts quite often return to this stage if not enough of the invited reviewers accepted the invitation so further invitations need to be sent. It’s quite common for editors to select a lot of reviewers, but only invite a few at a time.

Awaiting Reviewer Assignment

This rather ambiguous stage is when reviewers have been invited, but we are waiting for the required number to agree to review. In other words, at this point, the ball is squarely in the reviewers’ court!

In an ideal world, enough of the invited reviewers will agree to review and your manuscript will move on to the next stage. In reality, however, it is quite normal for invited reviewers to be unavailable and for your manuscript to return to one of the earlier stages a couple of times.

Awaiting Reviewer Scores

This is the stage that the editorial team will be striving to get your manuscript to as swiftly as possible. If your manuscript is at this stage, then enough experts have agreed to read and evaluate it and we just need to wait for the reviewers to return their comments so that a decision can be taken.

Once through this stage, your manuscript will move on to a stage such as “Awaiting Recommendation” and/or “Awaiting Decision” and it generally won’t be long before a decision is sent to you.

So That’s It?

That’s it. There are, of course, many things that can cause delays to the process, but the majority of manuscripts move from one stage to the next fairly swiftly.