Hence, peer review processes at scholarly journals can be perceived as community work with the aim to establish consistent and sustainable networks between all actors involved. Research Square and Nature are two distinct publication venues. One issue for discussion in that process is the role of the editor. Ross-Hellauer T., Deppe A., Schmidt B. Yet, as Horbach and Halffmann (2019) have outlined, peer review as an institutional practice at scholarly journals has a far more recent history, beginning in late 19th century in scientific societies which established the first disciplinary scholarly journals (Csiszar, 2018). While Decision Sent to Author plays a major role (N = 13,933), we also find a noteworthy amount of Drafting Decision Letter Started (N = 1,949) and Drafting Decision Letter Completed (N = 2,421). 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. The second possibility is the long decision path from "Manuscript Consultation Started" through external peer review to "Editor Decision Complete". The categorization table is attached as supplementary material to this paper. Journal decisions 6. Invite the authors to revise and resubmit their manuscript to address specific concerns. Editage Insights offers a wealth of free academic research and publishing resources and is a one-stop guide for authors and others involved in scholarly publishing. nature immunology about the editors About the Editors Like the other Nature titles, Nature Immunology has no external editorial board. The process sequence is very open in principle, but for a process leading from submission to decision, some regularity in the steps could be expected, that is, some nodes must be more likely than others to be passed and also, some edges must be more important than others respectively. This is known as a rescinding. As was said earlier, the infrastructure understands the process along the stages, a manuscript version passes through. Giving Bolivian Women As Gift ideas When Trigidia Jimnez started to provide caahua, it was only for private consumption in Bolivia, but today it's produced and offered by more than 1,500 households. Additionally, source and target vertices were inserted to make start and end of the process visible in plots. At this time, the AE read and evaluates the. These are considered appeals, which, by policy, take second place to consideration of normal submissions. The journal covers topics including: -Lasers, LEDs and other light sources -Imaging, detectors and sensors -Optoelectronic devices and components -Novel materials and engineered structures -Physics of light propagation, interaction and behaviour -Quantum optics and cryptography -Ultrafast photonics -Biophotonics -Optical data storage Confirm that you would also like to sign up for free personalized email coaching for this stage. Digital marketing - Wikipedia Journal Peer Review and Editorial Evaluation: Cautious Innovator or Sleepy Giant? Like other journals in the Nature family, Nature Microbiology has no external editorial board involved in editorial decision-making. [CDATA[> A closer look at process generated data allows us to explore which elements of the peer review and decision making process in scholarly journals are communicated and shared on a digital infrastructure, how the process of peer review is transformed into countable events and made visible. Before When should you challenge an editors decision to reject a paper? What is the meaning of "decision in process" status? 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. Icons made by various authors from www.flaticon.com, Experiential Live Edit: How to improve Biomed manuscripts. Empirically, we use digital traces from an editorial management system in order to gain insights into how the digitalized peer review process looks like. Editor's decision in Nature and under review in Research Square 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). When we plot the network with Kamada-Kawai layout, the high network density causes the network to appear as a circle (see Figure 4, left) with no visually detectable pattern between source and target. 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). While the potential exploitation of these process generated data may support the administration, it at the same time may also put more pressure on the editor, simply because these data can be shared and discussed with potential stakeholders of the publisher. //--> Consequently, the analysis shows how much organizational effort goes into what Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) have called the administrative parts of the peer review process to which this article pays particular attention. In the second section of the results, we aim at tracing the order of the events in the editorial management system. 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). manuscpt under consideration 40editor decision started. This service is available to authors at the time of decision or at a later time. Abstract: Symbiotic microorganisms are omnipresent in nature, ubiquitously associated with animals, plants, fungi, protists, and all other life forms including humans, ranging fro LetPub - Scientific Journal Selector | Nature Energy 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. Editorial decision making at Nature Genetics. This indicates, that administratively, the ongoing process is only indirectly affected by the reviewers recommendations, but directly affected by the editors decisions. SHORT ANSWER. However, when they communicated their decision to the Editor-in-Chief (EiC), who makes the final decision, it was decided to reconsider your manuscript. ~. The status 'Decision started' indicates that the peer review process for your manuscript is complete and the paper is now with the editor. 8600 Rockville Pike We thank Martin Reinhart for data acquisition and consultation as well as Felicitas Hesselmann for data acquisition and feedback. Your revised manuscript should be submitted using the link provided in the decision email, and not as a new manuscript. 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. In this regard, editorial management systems perform timekeeping, when they support and oversee the duration of sub-processes (Reviewer Waited too Long, Waiting for Authors Revision etc.). 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. We only find Review Started and Review Received in this respect, but we have, based on the event history only, no information as to what the reviewers might have recommended. Reconstructing the processes applying social network analysis, we found that the individual steps in the process have no strict order, other than could be expected with regard to the software patent. At the contrary, however, events triggered by authors and referees only affect events with actors assigned the same role. 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. 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. If your manuscript is rejected by the editor without the peer-reviewed process, please share with the community how many days you got the rejection email from the editor's office. 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). 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. In the data used for our investigation, we see traces of actions and participant roles in different processes. 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. 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). Yet, calls for reforms in scholarly peer review have grown louder particularly emerging from critics about biases in peer review (Cicchetti et al., 1992; Harnad, 1983; Bornmann 2005). 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. At the same time, they emphasize a power perspective with regard to different degrees of involvement for actors, their role and participant status. Improve the chances of your manuscripts acceptance by learning how to prepare a manuscript for journal submission and handle the peer review process. 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. Nature (journal) - Wikipedia We also thank the editor and the two reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Editage Insights is funded by Editage and endorses services provided by Editage but is editorially independent. 201451 XXXXX@nature.com Final decision for XXXXX. 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). More research would be needed in order to more closely reconstruct these events. Asked by Sanjay Karna Also, the database is, of course, more complex and stores lots of information from user accounts to e-mail communication, but our analyses refer exclusively to the manuscript life cycle. Editorial process : Nature Support The data stem from the editorial management system eJournalPress and the focal data used here are the history-information of 14,392 manuscript files referring to 17,109 manuscript versions processed in the years 2011 and 2015 in the infrastructure for four of the publishers journals, which depict the manuscript life cycle from the infrastructures point of view. 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. (2019). And, as the digital traces show, the editors carry them out thoroughly. Receive industry news, advice from editors & gallerists, exclusive deadlines, entry to the best images occasions and more on a weekly basis. 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. From an organizational perspective, the documentation of these events allows for carefully reconstructing and justifying difficult decisions, but it could also provide more insights into what happens at this stage of the process. . Shared post - Interview: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned After the decision, four things can happen, but empirically, the four decisions can be divided into two groups (see Figure 6). NatureNatureNatureNature Mater . How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain the editors agency for administrating the process? Review Started and Potential Referees Accept were mostly performed by the reviewer and achieved the highest frequency (both had N = 8,937). 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. nature~. AEditor Decision Complete, BManuscript Revise and Re-Review, CWaiting to Send Decision to Author, DManuscript Rejected, EManuscript Revise Only, FManuscript Accepted, GDrafting Decision Letter Started, HDrafting Decision Letter Completed, IManuscript Consultation Session Ended. 1 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. Exploring a digital infrastructure without actually having access to it is challenging. The logarithm was chosen because the time between stages is distributed skew to the left (see Figure 2). Mrowinski M. J., Fronczak A., Fronczak P., Nedic O., Ausloos M. (2016). 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. 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. 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. Consensus decision-making - Wikipedia sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal Sincerely Cite 1 Recommendation One. Internet Explorer). Valuable insights were gained from the categorization of events into the process element categories. If the editor decides to send the manuscript to peer reviewers, they will contact researchers with relevant expertise. Reviews for "Nature" - Page 1 - SciRev In our case, the digital traces particularly point to the editors procedural choices. According to Star and Bowker, infrastructures are used to enable, maintain and control collaboration among different actors (Star, 1999; Star and Bowker, 2006). Benjamin Franklin FRS FRSA FRSE (January 17, 1706 [O.S. Nature Decoding the decision letter - Cell a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the issues raised by the editor and peer reviewers, a response to each of the reviewers, replying to each of the points raised. The decision is framed by Editor Decision Started (N = 6,215, triggered often by the reviewer) and Editor Decision Complete (N = 13,973)the difference in size indicates, that the editors decision can happen directly without external consultation. 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. Recht Manage. In the database entry, we would later discover this as a digital trace of the action performed. 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. Find submission status of your article / manuscript - Nature Support Stage 1: Initial quality check This stage includes checks on authorship, competing interests, ethics approval and plagiarism. How long does an editor decision take? Answered by Editage Insights This characteristic of the peer review process we must consider specific for this publisher, according to our data, and not a general feature, as the editorial management software could also be used otherwise. nature~_ The editorial management system however, does not only record which actor with which role releases or triggers an event. Duration from Submission to 1 st Editorial Decision 50.2 days The average number of days from manuscript submission to the initial editorial decision on the article. and transmitted securely. If you need any assistance please contact us at Author Support, or contact the responsible editor for the journal. So to reduce the noise and to uncover the core process, we deleted all edges, which had a multiplicity of less than 1% of the number of items. Though many agree that scholarly publishing and peer review are social processes (Reinhart, 2010), investigations about the processes of scholarly publishing and peer review are rare, given that persons engaged in these processes actively resist investigation (Hirschauer, 2010, 73). 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. 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. Depending on the journal, the assignment may be done by technical staff, the journal's chief editor, or automatic by submission category or author suggestion. The EiC may have seen merits in your paper after all (or a fit, if that was the issue). Glonti K., Boutron I., Moher D., Hren D. (2019). . On the other hand, the editors decisions are stored in four different elements. Professional 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. In our study, we investigate editorial processes and practices with their data traces captured by an editorial management system. Yet, given our limited reconstruction of the event history, we cannot confirm this hypothesis. Our goal in posing these questions is to gain insights into how novel editorial management systems change or stabilize knowledge production. We started our empirical analysis following the conceptual heuristics of Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020), who provided elements of a minimal and maximum model of the peer review process. The first possibility is the short decision path from "Manuscript Consultation Started" directly to "Editor Decision Complete". HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help We use the perspective of the infrastructure by studying the recorded events it has created as a result of actions by different actors. 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. 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. 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. Once you have submitted your manuscript, it goes through the following editorial process: The journals editorial assistant will check that the manuscript and associated materials are complete. 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.