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. 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. This may as well reflect how editors take their responsibility as members of the scientific community. This means that a manuscript will usually loop through the review process more than once, depending on the editorial decisionin our case up to six times. 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. the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Because it was sitting in my barn / shop for over 12 years!! In this principal depiction, the digital infrastructure of the editorial management system is presented to foster values such as timeliness and comprehensiveness. Reviewers are notidentified to the authors, except at the request of the reviewer. 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). HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help Nine events could be attributed to this category, the most important being the four decision events Manuscript Accepted (N = 1,711), Manuscript Revise Only (893), Manuscript Revise and Re-Review (1,540) and Manuscript Rejected (9,835). The complete network is comprised of 72 vertices and 221,287 edges. Register for comprehensive research tips and expert advice on English writing, journal publishing, good publication practices, trends in publishing, and a lot more. The editor contacts potential reviewers. The most central node is Preliminary Manuscript Data Submitted which has 27,910 ingoing and outgoing edges, whereas the least central node is Initial QC failed (where QC stands for quality control) which has only 147 edges. Assistant Editor MDPI minor revisions5major revisions1030 HANDBOOK: Keep calm and wait: A guide to understanding journal statuses, Keep calm and wait: A guide to understanding journal statuses. 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. As editors, our aim is to send you a decision that will give you the best advice we can about how to move forward to get your work published. Such critics also fueled debates about new forms of open peer review, as technological or organizational innovations are imagined to ultimately alter editorial practices at scholarly journals (Ross-Hellauer et al., 2017). Nature CommunationsNature, @14:NatureComm.Manuscptunderconsideration)zipforreviewerzip, editordecisionstartednaturechemistry[], NatureComm.Manuscptunderconsideration), @13:editordecisionstartednaturechemistry, @38:ejournals, @13:editordecisionstartednaturechemistry, @5:NatureMatealsUnderReview.manuscptunderconsiderationEditorDecisionStartedmanuscptunderconsideration, @41:, naturecommunicationunderconsideration20, scichina life awaiting admin pcessing, IEICE The 1st Evaluation has been completed, 2010104Awaiting Reviewer Assignment, Submissions Being Pcessed(1)Submissions with a Decision (1), AngewSubmitted,Under review,. 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. Professional Established in 1947, the company is known for modern classic style that's both tim Nature 512, 126-129. They can only choose to participate in it or not. A pre-screening of our data showed that the first round of peer review differs from the subsequent ones. The patent depicts peer review as an ordered process with actions (such as sub-processes, documents and stored data) and bifurcations (see Figure 3). 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. 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. 2002 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 devote our program to one of the most scathing and insightful indictments of the modern-day corporate media, particularly their subservience to power centers and how they eagerly spread disinformation campaigns in service to that power. We focus our analysis on editorial peer review, that is, processes related to editorial selection, management and decision making. We also found the different realms of the peer review process represented in the system, some events, however, indicate that the infrastructure offers more control and observation of the peer review process, thereby strengthening the editorial role in the governance of peer review while at the same time the infrastructure oversees the editors performance. Answer: From the different status descriptions, it seems that the manuscript has not been sent for peer review. What do these status changes mean? ~. While there are similarities between the different ways of using peer review, peer review for manuscript evaluation is specific in the way it is embedded within the organization of scholarly journals (Hirschauer 2004). The average number of days between the date of manuscript submission and date of receiving the editorial acceptance decision. Editorial contacts can be found by clicking on the "Help & support" button under. While focussing our analysis only on the case of one biomedical publisher, we may infer some more general observations for this realm of research. [2] [3] It has 193 member states and 12 associate members, [4] as well as partners in the non . It is clear from the status descriptions that your revised manuscript was sent for peer review again. It can mean many things, if the status has been same since you resubmitted your manuscript then editor might still be waiting for all the reviewers to send the editors their review reports, in some cases when one reviewer is too much busy and needs more time to finalize his review report, editors waits for him to send his comments then they contact the author and make a decision on the basis . The figure shows the decisions for the original manuscript version (v0) and resubmitted versions (v1v5). The editor is probably going through the reviews to arrive at a decision. A Comparison of German Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences, Krger A. K., Hesselmann F., Hartstein J. 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. The most interesting component of the disintegrated network was, of course, the one which included the four decision events. If this is nature group and it is "editor decision started" then it means the editor did something, including receiving a review report or selecting a new reviewer (from what I have experienced) Why are papers rejected? Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. 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. I have recently checked the research records (on ORCID, Scopus and Scholar) of Nature editors, I have also conducted web searches to trace their academic background, and I found that the. The site is secure. 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. We use the perspective of the infrastructure by studying the recorded events it has created as a result of actions by different actors. We stopped disintegration at the iteration before the four different decision events Manuscript Rejected, Manuscript Revise and Re-Review, Manuscript Revise only and Manuscript Accepted fell apart from each other into different components. nature scienceBoard of Reviewing Editors scienceBoard of Reviewing Editors Board of Reviewing Editorsnaturescience Board of Reviewing Editorsscience connection After noise-reduction, a core component emerges. The performance of the editor can thus be controlled and evaluated by other stakeholders in the organization of the publisher. The other possibility, as you have correctly judged, is that the manuscript might receive a desk rejection. 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. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2021.747562/full#supplementary-material, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=data.table, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggraph, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-116609, Manuscript identifier with version indicator, Role of person acting (relative to manuscript). As Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) have outlined, differences in the governance of peer review systems become visible not only in how the process of peer review is transformed in a sequence of events, but also in how the different actors take part in this process and how they affect each others actions. This underlines the strong position and great responsibility of the editor. 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). If an appeal merits further consideration, the editors may send the authors' response or the revised paper to one or more reviewers, or they may ask one reviewer to comment on the concerns raised by another reviewer. resubmitnoveltyresubmit, 4. When should you challenge an editors decision to reject a paper? This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The original ideas and values attached to the system are expressed well by the developers of the technology, who, by aiming at facilitating the process of peer review, defined major entities and activities for administrating manuscripts. This dimensionality reduction probably obfuscates some properties of the implemented process, such as if it may have been acyclic in higher dimensionality, which we cannot observe any more, limiting the potential for our investigation. The operationalization and implementation shows specific interpretations of the peer review process as an organizational activity. Furthermore, the editor is described as optional in the patent: The publishing organization can, optionally, assign an editor, monitoring editor, or associate editor to oversee the review process [] and make the final publishing approval decision. (Plotkin, 2009, p.4), but also the patent is open to an automated decision making. 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). Nevertheless, our approach leads to methodological questions of digital inquiries. D1ckChowder 2 yr. ago It could mean many things. At the same time, they emphasize a power perspective with regard to different degrees of involvement for actors, their role and participant status. Marres (2017) points out that by dealing with data from digital infrastructures, research agency is twisted: the data often prompt the researcher to their perspective and methodology, resulting in that digital research requires an at once critical and creative approach to method (p.115). Centrality is a relative measure, putting different nodes into an ordered relation. In order to get more insights which kinds of events are represented by the editorial management system inside the above mentioned core component with 48 nodes, and adapted by the publisher, we analysed their frequency for the whole dataset and tried to categorize them according to the heuristic provided by Schendzielorz and Reinhart. Does the status 'Decision in process' without peer review imply Recent research into platforms (Blmel, 2021) has argued that novel digital infrastructures are considered as agents of change for scholarly practices by incorporating several functions relevant for decision making and quality control. Article proofs sent to author 4. 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). government site. Administrative practices of coordinating manuscripts, selecting reviewers and managing consultations are increasingly difficult to separate from observational practices without direct effect on the process, which can be, according to Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020, p.19), considered as relevant for controlling the peer review process. I submitted a paper in a journal. It's showing under consideration for What is worth noting is that the content of reviewers opinions is not visible in the process, although the reviews are clearly processed by the infrastructure. Decline publication, typically on grounds of either there being insufficient support for the conclusions or a reassessment of the level of interest or advance in light of the reviewers' comments. Does "Under Review" mean that the paper has passed the editorial check? FOIA Thus, the heterogeneity of roles affected by editors shows their coordinating role in the process, due to what Reinhart and Schendzielorz have called the administrative practices of peer review. Digital infrastructures such as editorial management systems allow for processing data about the submission, evaluation and decision of manuscripts in novel ways, taking particularly the velocity, role specificity and consistence of the peer review process into account. 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. According to Guston (2001), there is a social contract granting autonomy and self-regulation to science only if scientific quality and productivity is ensured. 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. The quantitative analyses were performed with the use of R (R Core Team, 2020) and the following contributed packages: igraph (Csardi and Nepusz, 2006), tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019), lubridate (Grolemund and Wickham, 2011), data.table (Dowle and Srinivasan, 2021) and ggraph (Pedersen, 2021). 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? [CDATA[// >