About the Editors | Nature Immunology 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. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Batagelj V., Ferligoj A., Squazzoni F. (2017). 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. FOIA The process elements postulation (P), consultation (C), decision (D) and administration (A), adapted after Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020), are mutually connected with each other, but seen by the infrastructure from the standpoint of administration. 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. Because it was sitting in my barn / shop for over 12 years!! If we rule out automated decision making (which we elaborate on later in this text). 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. 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). One-click to visualize your research performance Researchain.net Nature Ecology and Evolution Submission Timeline & Revision Speed Duration from Submission to 1 st Editorial Decision 4.4 days The average number of days from manuscript submission to the initial editorial decision on the article. . Magdalena is a geneticist by training and has considerable editorial and publishing experience: having started in Nature Publishing Group in 2001, she was Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Genetics, Senior Editor for genetics and genomics at Nature, and more recently Executive Editor for the Nature Partner Journals. 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. Stage 2: Editor assigned. 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. Editor assigned Editor Declined Invitation Decision Letter Being Prepared "Decision in Process" 4.Reviewer (s) invited . 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? The focus on establishing agreement of at least the majority or the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires . Nature Photonics | Peer-Review Duration, Review Speed, Revision Process Plotkin (2009) in laying out the basis of the editorial management system used in our case patented a process for computer implemented manuscript review and described a prototypical journal peer review process. The patent shows a limited perspective on the peer review process, rendering the system itself invisible as a component (see Figure 7). The editorial management system however, does not only record which actor with which role releases or triggers an event. We also thank the editor and the two reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. 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. This to be acknowledged, Seaver (2017) described some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems, of which we take up the tactic of scavenging in our work: using the pieces of information accessible to us while at the same time keeping in mind that we only see a part of the whole picture. The infrastructure models the peer review process along the way of submitted (versions of) manuscripts, which enter the system during submission and pass through different stages afterwards. Editors are often perceived as the gate keepers of science (Crane, 1967), distributing credit and reputation by deciding about papers to be published against field and journal specific values and criteria (Jubb, 2015, p.14). Editorial Process & Peer Review | Nature Microbiology dmsder moderne staatZeitschrift fr Public Pol. I submitted a paper in a journal. It's showing under consideration for The editor contacts the author with the decision. Different to what the patent for the technology suggests, the actual use of the infrastructure may be particularly complex, revealing the difficulties in managing and maintaining collaboration among different types of actors. Further, it indicates respect for the authors as sentient beings possibly frustrated about a negative decision. //--> Editorial process : Springer Support Upon transfer, if the manuscript is assessed by the receiving journal to be a good fit and technically sound, it may be accepted without further review. Yet, in our data set, we also found events that reach beyond administrative activities, because they document pace, effectiveness, or quality of the process or the item (the manuscript), thus enabling quality control and supervision of the whole process, which we label observational elements. What does the status 'Decision started' mean? 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. We thank Martin Reinhart for data acquisition and consultation as well as Felicitas Hesselmann for data acquisition and feedback. 2 wormified 4 yr. ago A month sounds optimistic to me :-) 2 [deleted] 4 yr. ago [removed] riricide 4 yr. ago Can I ask the editor to publish a withdrawn manuscript after acceptance? 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. Subscribe and get curated content that will give impetus to your research paper. Internet Explorer). Katharina is a communications expert, science communicator, non-fictional book author and now Communications Director at the foundation "Gesunde Erde - Gesunde Menschen".<br><br>While earning her doctorate, she taught with a focus on cultural and media studies at the LMU Munich. 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. What is the meaning of "decision in process" status? At the same time, however, editorial management systems as digital infrastructures transform that process by defining sequences, ends, values and evaluation criteria, which are inscribed already in the production process of such devices (see Krger et al., 2021). 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. When all the reviewer reports are received, the editors decide to either: If you are invited to revise and resubmit your manuscript, you should follow the instructions provided by the editor in their decision email. If the editor decides to send the manuscript to peer reviewers, they will contact researchers with relevant expertise. Yet, the analysis of processual data from an editorial management system may lead to research paying more attention to organizational issues of scholarly publishing, that is, practices related with maintaining and binding reviewers, authors and editors to a scholarly journal. 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). Of all 11,103 manuscripts which make it to a decision at least in one round, the first submitted version is rejected in the vast majority of the cases, whereas manuscripts which make it through the first round, stand a good chance to be accepted in the later stages, as is shown in Figure 1. 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. In light of their advice, I am delighted to say that we can in principle offer to publish it in Nature, provided that you revise the paper to address a number of further editorial points. 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. Thus, it is rendered invisible as distinguishable component. This network turned out to be relatively complex with 72 nodes and 623 edges, and relatively dense (with d = 0.12), which means, that 12 percent of all theoretically possible edges occur empirically. Assistant Editor MDPI minor revisions5major revisions1030 Like other journals in the Nature family, Nature Microbiology has no external editorial board involved in editorial decision-making. 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. The editor-infrastructure compound while overseeing the whole process can only distinguish the other three components from each other, but cannot discriminate the administration. 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). Read Editage Insights in your favorite RSS Reader. 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). 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. A pre-screening of our data showed that the first round of peer review differs from the subsequent ones. Review Time in Peer Review: Quantitative Analysis and Modelling of Editorial Workflows, Perspektiven der Infrastrukturforschung: care-full, relational, ko-laborativ, Schlsselwerke der Science & Technology Studies, Ggraph: An Implementation of Grammar of Graphics for Graphs and Networks, From Manuscript Evaluation to Article Valuation: The Changing Technologies of Journal Peer Review, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, Peer Review Practices: A Content Analysis of External Reviews in Science Funding, Zwischen Reputation und Markt: Ziele, Verfahren und Instrumente von (Selbst)Evaluationen aueruniversitrer, ffentlicher Forschungseinrichtungen. In the second category, which Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) have called consultation, we subsumed nine events, which are mainly performed by editors, reviewers and none roles. The average number of days between the date of manuscript submission and date of receiving the editorial acceptance decision. Icons made by various authors from www.flaticon.com, Experiential Live Edit: How to improve Biomed manuscripts. In any case, not assigning a role to some actors shows that those are regarded less relevant for the editorial process by design. 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. An official website of the United States government. .. In contrast for our case, we hypothesize that the important things happen, where manuscripts differ from each other this means that the passage points tend to carry less information about the process elements. 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. 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). . editor decision started nature 2022.6.13 Editor Decision Started Decision sent to author NZip for reviewers 2022.10.10 9All Reviewers Assigned109Manuscript under consideration Furthermore, the following events were attributed to postulation: Manuscript File Added (N = 6,356), Manuscript File Replaced (N = 3,261) and Manuscript Withdrawn (N = 228), the latter being attributed to postulation because authors can decide as to whether they want to keep or withdraw their claim. Answer: From the different status descriptions, it seems that the manuscript has not been sent for peer review. Wickham H., Averick M., Bryan J., Chang W., McGowan L., Franois R., et al. 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. 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. Reviewer selection is critical to the review process, and we work hard to ensure that the different technical and conceptual aspects of the work are covered. sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain editorial agency for administrating the process? 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). Also, infrastructures in science such as editorial management systems are embedded in highly structured practices, such as the selection of reviewers, formats for presenting and evaluating manuscripts from which they cannot be separated. If the editor is satisfied with your work, they will choose appropriate peer reviewers to evaluate your work, taking into account several factors including expertise, experience . 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). What does editor decision started mean nature? Its development during the 1990s and 2000s changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing.As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into . At the same time, they emphasize a power perspective with regard to different degrees of involvement for actors, their role and participant status. Editor's decision in Nature and under review in Research Square [CDATA[// >