There are lots of submission systems available, all of which look wildly different but essentially do the same job – keeping all the information pertaining to your submission in one place where the editorial team can access it regardless of where they are in the world. For more information on why we use online systems to handle peer review, see our earlier post here.
At The Editorial Hub, our team predominantly works with online peer-review systems so they’re something we’re very familiar with. Here’s a quick introduction to some of our favourites!
ScholarOne Manuscripts (Clarivate)
ScholarOne (formerly Manuscript Central) is currently used by over 7,000 journals worldwide. If you’re involved in scholarly publishing in any way – be it as an author, reviewer, or editor – chances are you’ll have used ScholarOne at some point.
You know where you are with a ScholarOne system. The interface for authors and reviewers is fairly user-friendly with customisable instructions, and all the information that the editorial office needs is easily accessible. Generally speaking, ScholarOne is solid, dependable, and predictable – all good traits in a tool designed specifically to make life easier!
Editorial Manager (Aries Systems)
Also used by thousands of journals across the globe, Editorial Manager is a highly-configurable system “optimized to streamline editorial processes and communication”.
Editorial Manager has a lot of functionality and is very customisable. It also has some great menus that give you overviews of the manuscripts in progress grouped in various ways – e.g., by editor or by status – at the click of a button.
EJPress (eJournalPress)
As with the previous two, EJPress also has a lot of functionality and is “fully configurable”.
All manuscripts in progress are sorted into folders which are preceded by a big red arrow when they contain papers that are awaiting action. It has a folder containing all chasers – reminder emails for authors, reviewers, and editors – which means it’s easy for the administrator to keep an eye on all papers with overdue tasks, regardless of what stage of peer review the paper’s reached.
ReView (River Valley Technologies)
ReView is a relatively new system designed to be as user friendly as possible, with an intuitive interface that only shows users the information they need to carry out the task at hand.
One big plus for ReView is the native handling of LaTeX files, something which other systems can struggle with. It’s extremely customisable so you can tailor it to your team and their preferred workflow, and the reporting function is simple to use and provides real time data on anything you need to know.