If you need any assistance please contact us at Author Support, or contact the responsible editor for the journal. 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. Nevertheless, our approach leads to methodological questions of digital inquiries. We found that there is no standardized role for automated processing or decision making: the digital infrastructure itself is not explicitly listed as actor in the patent, but is only visible in the digital traces. We sorted seven events into this category (according to their labelling and the distribution of triggering roles), of which the event Preliminary Manuscript Data Submitted is the event with the highest frequency in the database (N = 16,901), followed by Author Approved Converted Files (N = 13,978). The main aims of our study are hence the following: By investigating process generated data from a publishers editorial management system, we aim to explore the ways by which the digital infrastructure is used and how it represents the process of peer review. 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. Sincerely Cite 1 Recommendation One. Consequently, infrastructures may best be understood as manifestations of specific operations or sometimes even of a whole process (Niewhner, 2014, 6). Also, with Friedman and Nissenbaum (1996), we argue, that the infrastructure itself is shaped by assumptions from its developers about how the world is like and should be. Cactus Communications. Also, in contrast to what Taubert (2012) describes, we can assume, that the digital infrastructure in our case is not only imposed on the editors but is understood by them as a tool, which works otherwise, they could adjust the system configuration or even collectively demand to abolish it. 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. In our study, we investigate editorial processes and practices with their data traces captured by an editorial management system. This indicates, that administratively, the ongoing process is only indirectly affected by the reviewers recommendations, but directly affected by the editors decisions. //-->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, . Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. [CDATA[> 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. This may show that the submission procedure is standardised, possibly making some forms of research impossible to submit. 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. 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. 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. However, when they communicated their decision to the Editor-in-Chief (EiC), who makes the final decision, it was decided to reconsider your manuscript. Hereinafter, to demarcate different perspectives, we speak of actions or activities, when we refer to what is done, and we talk about events or stages, when we refer to what is recorded in the infrastructure and found in the data traces. We have shown in our contribution, that the peer review process in digital infrastructures is complex: We started from an abstract description of a minimal peer review process with four elements according to Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020), acknowledged an ideal digitalized process with seventeen positioned components according to a patent (Plotkin, 2009) and empirically found an open process with 72 events in it. You should hear back within a week or two. That is why it would be difficult to make claims about changes between a pre-digital and a digital scholarly journal world: we simply do not know enough about organizational practices of peer review as such, though research about peer review has grown recently (Batagelj et al., 2017). We thank Martin Reinhart for data acquisition and consultation as well as Felicitas Hesselmann for data acquisition and feedback. In the event of publication, the received date is the date of submission to the journal where the manuscript is published. 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. If the editor decides to send the manuscript to peer reviewers, they will contact researchers with relevant expertise. The rejected manuscripts and those to be resubmitted get a special treatment by the editors: the communication about the frustrating decision is thoroughly crafted showing in the network as two vertices about Drafting Decision Letter, notably resulting in longer durations for decisions to be sent to authors. We do so by making use of the internal representation of manuscript life cycles from submission to decision for 14,000 manuscripts submitted to a biomedical publisher. And, as the digital traces show, the editors carry them out thoroughly. SHORT ANSWER. Answered by Editage Insights . A significant number of events (11,866, to be precise) released by editors affect actors with none specified roles. 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. (For one manuscript, no first version was present in the inventory hence, the difference between 14,392 and 14,391 manuscripts). 201451 XXXXX@nature.com Final decision for XXXXX. Please share with the community how many days the entire process took by the editor's office. 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. We use the perspective of the infrastructure by studying the recorded events it has created as a result of actions by different actors. round 1""nature nature metabolism. The editorial process as depicted in the patent (from: Plotkin (2009)). The numbers indicate, how often a specific decision is reached for the respective version (the in-degree of the node). [CDATA[> 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. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication. the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in 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. More information about the manuscript transfer service can be found here. At the same time, they emphasize a power perspective with regard to different degrees of involvement for actors, their role and participant status. In contrast, in our data, the editors play a major role, performing lots of tasks affecting actors with other roles assigned and there is no automated decision making at play, when it comes to the final publishing approval decision. More research would be needed in order to more closely reconstruct these events. Either rejection or sending it out for review. The analysis may also provide first insights to what extent the events recorded are automatically generated. LetPub Scientific Journal Selector (2018-2021), Nature Energy published in 2016, UNITED STATES. The operationalization and implementation shows specific interpretations of the peer review process as an organizational activity. Article proofs sent to author 4. Our results may inform future studies and allow for making more detailed observations of the editorial process. One issue for discussion in that process is the role of the editor. Currently there is so far no systematic analysis of the structure of practices in the peer review process. APA has partnered with LetPub to provide a full suite of author services. Also, the process as described in the patent and inscribed in the software would be technically open to integrate all kinds of checks at this point even automated detection of content similarity with other papers as presupposition for plagiarism prevention. Finding reviewers who agree to deal with the . Also Revision Received (N = 2,498) was attributed to postulation representing a renewed claim of the author; and Halted Manuscript Deleted (N = 3,380) as this was triggered mainly by the authors. The performance of the editor can thus be controlled and evaluated by other stakeholders in the organization of the publisher. 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. Also, Editor Recommendation Started (N = 431) was attributed to this category. The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2021.747562/full#supplementary-material, National Library of Medicine Order of the process without and with noise reduction. (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 . Again actors assigned editorial roles stand out, because their actions significantly affect actors with other roles assigned. 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. The two additional source and target nodes make start and end of the process visible. Also, when we conceptually refer to the process, we write element or component for conglomerates of either actions or events which belong together. From the start of manuscript consultation until the editors decision: The figure shows that there is a short way (red) without external consultation and the long and complex way with external reviewers (grey). As described above, to investigate the idealized process from the patent empirically, we constructed a simplified network from the recorded events for all 14,391 first-version manuscripts, in which the nodes represent the stages and edges are drawn between two events which follow one another. While we do not have empirical material about the interpretations of the process by the actors themselves, processual data and the sequences of events may at least allow for abductive reasoning about how the editorial role is structured, and, in light of the literature about peer review, transformed, by using the infrastructure. and JavaScript. Received 2021 Jul 26; Accepted 2021 Sep 20. 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. The second possibility is the long decision path from Manuscript Consultation Started through external peer review to Editor Decision Complete. Once your manuscript passes the initial quality check, we assign it to a member of Editorial Board, who is an active researcher in your field. This led us to iteratively disintegrate the network by deleting the passage points. For the investigation of actions with regard to the different roles in the process, the whole dataset was used. The status 'Decision started' indicates that the peer review process for your manuscript is complete and the paper is now with the editor. The editorial management system makes these different roles visible, by attributing person-IDs as authors, editors and reviewers to manuscripts. Our goal in posing these questions is to gain insights into how novel editorial management systems change or stabilize knowledge production. We found multiple observations for each manuscript with a stage name, a time stamp and two pseudonymized person-identity numbers (hereinafter, person-IDs), in the system originally identifying individual users assigned to it the person who triggered an event and the person affected by an event (judging by the xml-tags assigned to the information). Based on Nature's website it looks like the editor sends a letter regardless of the decision so your editor is probably just writing the decision and it could be anything from accept without revision (hopefully) all the way to reject without reconsideration. 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. 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. typoresubmitstagedecision sent to author&, proofproofnaturepublish, ScienceNatureScienceScience, Editor assigned (Peer-review) (discovery) (invention)novelunexpected)The criteria for a paper to be sent for peer-review are that the results seem novel, arresting (illuminating, unexpected or surprising), and that the work described has both immediate and far-reaching implicationsnaturescienceBoard of Reviewing EditorsscienceBoard of Reviewing EditorsBoard of Reviewing EditorsnaturescienceBoard of Reviewing Editorsscienceconnection, 22, Peer-review, Peer-review, 2. What does the status 'under editor evaluation' mean? These last three events were in the majority of the cases not recorded as triggered by the authors, but by the none role, displaying their additional observational or administrative character. 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. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The institution of scholarly peer review as the main instance for scientific quality assurance appears to be comparably stable since more than three hundred years, despite several technical changes (Reinhart, 2010; Pontille and Torny, 2015; Horbach and Halffman, 2019). Also, the initial quality control of manuscripts, indicated by the events Initial QC Started (N = 14,499), Initial QC Complete (14,288) and Initial QC Failed (N = 418) referring to the submission (where QC stands for quality control and the relation of failed versus complete initial quality controls shows that this event is mostly independent from the decision category), can be attributed to that category, because it potentially would also allow for detecting structural problems in the quality of submissions, thereby informing the controlling of the process. The categorization table is attached as supplementary material to this paper. 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.
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