For some time, the manuscript items are actively maintained when they undergo consultation eventually, when they are decided about, and when the editorial decision is communicated to the authors and/or the manuscript is sent to production. This matched with what we would have expected to happen: there are editorial decisions without peer review, which is also represented by the editorial management system. The reviewers further triggered Review Received (N = 8,672), First Referee Accepted (N = 2,766) and Review Complete (N = 3,222), the latter indicating that a consultation event has actually taken place. That is why we also focus our structural analysis of the peer review process on this first round of peer review. 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. We found that there was a central vertex dividing the decision component in two parts: Editor Decision Complete is the demarcation between events before (review process) and after decision (decision communication). The raw manuscript histories were parsed from xml-files to a table and are rather simple in structure, but lack a documentation. Ross-Hellauer T., Deppe A., Schmidt B. Please share with the community how many days the entire process took by the editor's office. We focus our analysis on editorial peer review, that is, processes related to editorial selection, management and decision making. Against that background, the goals of this research are 1) to explore the structure of activities in the process of handling manuscripts based on insights gained from process generated data from an editorial management system, taking Schendzielorzs and Reinharts (2020) model of the peer review process as a conceptual heuristic. 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. Editors are responsible for making manuscript decisions based upon reviewer reports and their own reading of the manuscript. When the process is finished, the manuscript lies dormant in the database. Full disclosure: Editage Insights is a product of Editage, a global provider of world-class scientific communication solutions. The actions are attributed with manuscripts they belong to, and points in time when they were carried out, which is why we are able to infer the order of actions, choices at forks and pace of the process. The editorial peer review process for a single manuscript version is investigated from three perspectives: the perspective which considers the sequencialization (which stages are passed in which order) of the process, the pace (how long does a step take) of the manuscript during the process and the magnitude (how many manuscripts go along a specific path). As was said earlier, the infrastructure understands the process along the stages, a manuscript version passes through. 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. Year Publication Started 2016 *Crowdsourced data. The description of the variables was mainly derived from the field names, their values and the xml-structure in the raw data and is given in Table 1. 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 . GUID:EFC9DCE3-3C9C-46E8-B28A-8E8EFE53517D, editorial management systems, peer review, process generated data, digital transformation of scholarly publishing, digital infrastructure. Consensus decision-making or consensus process (often abbreviated to consensus) are group decision-making processes in which participants develop and decide on proposals with the aim, or requirement, of acceptance by all. 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. 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. 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. They can only choose to participate in it or not. Also, Editor Recommendation Started (N = 431) was attributed to this category. What does the status 'under editor evaluation' mean? UNESCO. 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. Following her doctorate, she has worked as an editor, freelance writer and communications expert and advisor . The accepted manuscripts as well as those subject to revision are not processed further in this graph component. Such heterogeneous uses influence and transform the infrastructure as an assemblage of situated digitally mediated practices (Horbach and Halffman, 2020, p.2), that is, practices which can only be understood in the context of their local usage (e.g., a specific function accomplished within the context of a specific journal). In the patent, it says: A users role includes one or more of the following relationships between the manuscript and the associated person: author, editor, associate editor, reviewer, or staff member. (Plotkin, 2009 p.5). Abstract: Symbiotic microorganisms are omnipresent in nature, ubiquitously associated with animals, plants, fungi, protists, and all other life forms including humans, ranging fro Confirm that you would also like to sign up for free personalized email coaching for this stage. With regard to roles and activities of the editor, there is support as well as control by the infrastructure. On the other hand, the users of type editor seem to have much leeway regarding which tasks they choose to perform in which order, hence the empirical process network has so many different edges. Events after decision with multiplicity and median duration show that editors thoroughly communicate about negative decisions. Many researchers, reviewers and editors do have opinions about the roles and responsibilities of both editors and reviewers (Glonti et al., 2019), some of which contradict each other (Glonti et al., 2019, p.1). While different studies about the roles and tasks of both reviewers and editors were published (Hirschauer, 2010; Glonti et al., 2019), editorial practices are only rarely investigated (Weller, 2001). Authors may suggest reviewers; these suggestions are often helpful, although they are not always followed. Some of these activities, formerly external to the normal administrative editorial work, may now be automated by the infrastructure, leading to novel control technologies which may also put the editorial role under stronger pressure. 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 . . While these activities certainly would exist without editorial management systems, the latter makes them more visible and suspect to monitoring and optimization, because they can standardize editorial practices. Hence, there is no such thing as a uniform process put into place by a technology. On the one hand, the observational procedures might help the editor to oversee whether other actors accomplish their tasks in time, on the other hand, actions of the editors are tracked as well. 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). 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. Apparently, appeal plays a minor role with Waiting for Appeal (N = 355), Appeal Received (N = 358) and Appeal Request Accepted (N = 355), but with overall low numbers. [CDATA[> The following decision types are available: Reject; Major revision; Minor revision; Accept; Decisions are communicated to the corresponding author in a formal letter, along with reviewer feedback and any other requirements from the . 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. 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). 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. Careers, Unable to load your collection due to an error, This article was submitted to Scholarly Communication, a section of the journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. A significant number of events (11,866, to be precise) released by editors affect actors with none specified roles. 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. Wickham H., Averick M., Bryan J., Chang W., McGowan L., Franois R., et al. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [a] is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. If you need any assistance please contact us at Author Support, or contact the responsible editor for the journal. We therefore deduce, that the participant group of none roles must in part be comprised of non-humans (i.e., the infrastructure itself). Decisions are reversed on appeal only if the editors are convinced that the original decision was an error. Editorial management systems are digital infrastructures processing the submission, evaluation and administration of scholarly articles. In our study, we investigate editorial processes and practices with their data traces captured by an editorial management system. The editor and the editorial team decide whether or not to send the manuscript out to review; the corresponding author is contacted with the decision. More information about the manuscript transfer service can be found here. In the light of the transparent review process at this publisher, where editorial decision letters are published alongside accepted papers, this is especially interesting, because decision letters for successful submissions can be expected to have a much larger audience than for non-successful submissions. . 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). The publisher uses the system EJournalPress to manage their editorial peer review lead by full-time staff editors in a shared office space. 117. 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. 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. Valuable insights were gained from the categorization of events into the process element categories. The editor contacts potential reviewers. Recently, it has been established that in a minimal case, the peer review process is comprised of postulation, consultation, decision and administration. Editor assignment or invitation Based on the topic of the manuscript and suggestions by the authors, an editor is assigned to handle the manuscript. Some authors ask the editors to reconsider a rejection decision. ~. Nine events were attributed to the administrative activities of the peer review process, according to Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) comprising processes, where postulations are received, their treatments are initiated or being coordinated. //-->

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