The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the Across all Wolters Kluwer journals, the average time that a manuscript moves through the submission process from submission to first decision takes about 30 days, and to a final . For instance, 10,522 events triggered by editors affect referees. In the database entry, we would later discover this as a digital trace of the action performed. 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. Icons made by various authors from www.flaticon.com, Experiential Live Edit: How to improve Biomed manuscripts. Consequently, we infer that the infrastructure becomes performative in the sense that an idealized model implemented as software defines what tasks are supported and which are neither supported nor tracked. 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. Cactus Communications. In the minimal process of peer review according to Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020), we would find the four processual elements being mutually connected with each other. The multiplicity of edges expresses how often its ends occur in direct sequence in the whole dataset, that means, for all first version manuscripts together. Improve the chances of your manuscripts acceptance by learning how to prepare a manuscript for journal submission and handle the peer review process. 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. 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. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Editorial management systems are digital infrastructures processing the submission, evaluation and administration of scholarly articles. Thank you for visiting nature.com. nature~. NatureNatureNatureNature Mater . (2021). on 30 Mar, 2017, This content belongs to the Journal submission & peer review Stage. The reviewer comments were very helpful to improve the quality of our work, and also the editor was helpful and responsive. Article proofs sent to author 4. The event information was further enriched with year of submission, pseudonym of journal, and by (pseudonymized) data about the roles (editor, author, reviewer or none) of the person-IDs with regard to the respective manuscripts. 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. Editorial decision making at Nature Genetics. Please see our guidelines for initial submission to make sure that you provide us with all necessary information at this stage. German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Berlin, Germany, 2 The editor contacts potential reviewers. Some authors claim transformative changes would be at play for practices of editors handling manuscripts: Taubert (2012) for instance has stated that journal editorial management systems standardise the peer review process and constrain the degrees of freedom for editors. Comparisons with novel digital infrastructures (and their implementations) for other publishers with different peer review models are necessary in order to more systematically judge or reflect on the influence of these infrastructural tools on innovation or stabilization in editorial work. Your revised manuscript should be submitted using the link provided in the decision email, and not as a new manuscript. The idea to apply peer culture to science in order to protect the community of knowledge makers emerged in the Royal Society in late 17th century (Shapin 1994). 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. This is partly caused by several automated steps present in the process, which can take only one second to happen. Further consideration may be merited if a reviewer made substantial errors of fact or there is significant evidence of bias, but only if a reversal of that reviewer's opinion would have changed the original decision. All Rights Reserved. Editor assigned Editor Declined Invitation Decision Letter Being Prepared "Decision in Process" 4.Reviewer (s) invited 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). 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). Hopefully, you will be informed of the decision soon. At the same time, they emphasize a power perspective with regard to different degrees of involvement for actors, their role and participant status. 117. And, as the digital traces show, the editors carry them out thoroughly. (Manuscript under submission->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, . Authors may suggest reviewers; these suggestions are often helpful, although they are not always followed. 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. As was said earlier, the infrastructure understands the process along the stages, a manuscript version passes through. How long should I wait for a response from the journal? Although, the latter sounds like a decision event, it is mainly recorded as triggered by the reviewers and is clearly located in the network before the decision. They employ single-blind peer review, which means that the reviewers are aware of the authors identities unless otherwise requested by the authors. .. . This data represents a full inventory of manuscript version histories for the given years and journals, covering all submitted manuscripts whether published in the end, or not. Motivation: Altogether, this was a positive experience. Review Started and Potential Referees Accept were mostly performed by the reviewer and achieved the highest frequency (both had N = 8,937). No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. 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. Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. on 21 Oct, 2016. Scholarly journals invest considerable effort in maintaining peer culture by establishing close links to authors, reviewers, and (guest) editors (Weller, 2001). Picking the right philosophy of life is a vital decision, write Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary and Daniel A. Kaufman - whether your a Stoic, an Existentialist of an Aristotelian. Many journals now rely on editorial management systems (Taubert, 2012), 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 (Mendona, 2017). 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. To identify important passage points in the network, we chose node degree centrality with respect to edge multiplicity. Consequently, infrastructures may best be understood as manifestations of specific operations or sometimes even of a whole process (Niewhner, 2014, 6). The remaining network has only 96 edges and a density of d = 0.02, and a core-periphery structure becomes visible (see Figure 4, right). The categorization table is attached as supplementary material to this paper. Drawing from the theoretical considerations explained above, we first present results regarding the different roles which the editorial management system supports and enables in order to understand how the governance of the process is represented and performed by the editorial management system. 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). We have no insights into how triggering and affecting is defined for the infrastructure but can only infer from the fact that the infrastructure registers the person-ID as triggering or affected from its limited perspective. In our study, we investigate editorial processes and practices with their data traces captured by an editorial management system. . Nevertheless, our approach leads to methodological questions of digital inquiries. In the third section, the data and their preparation are described in more detail, elaborating on why a social network approach appears to be suitable for exploring relationships between events of the editorial process mediated by the system. If you need any assistance please contact us at Author Support, or contact the responsible editor for the journal. 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. Usually, the associate editor makes the publication decision (I'm sure the editor in chief can overrule this decision, but it usually doesn't happen). What does the status 'Decision started' mean? 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. The editorial management system however, does not only record which actor with which role releases or triggers an event. Exploring a digital infrastructure without actually having access to it is challenging. 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). 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. 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. This relates to recent research lines focusing on the stability and transformability of editorial practices by Horbach and Halffman (2020, p.3) arguing that existing editorial practices can be stabilized by infrastructures. In the event of publication, the received date is the date of submission to the journal where the manuscript is published. [CDATA[// >