As the case studied here shows, editorial management systems can be and are adapted to their context. 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. 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 patented process is implemented as software, which is then adapted locally to the journals and publishers needs, taking stock of the diversity of scholarly publishing. The phase of data collection was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within project 01PQ16003. The status 'Decision started' indicates that the peer review process for your manuscript is complete and the paper is now with the editor. Accessibility Also, in contrast to what Taubert (2012) describes, we can assume, that the digital infrastructure in our case is not only imposed on the editors but is understood by them as a tool, which works otherwise, they could adjust the system configuration or even collectively demand to abolish it. FOIA Editor in Chief, Nature. Also Revision Received (N = 2,498) was attributed to postulation representing a renewed claim of the author; and Halted Manuscript Deleted (N = 3,380) as this was triggered mainly by the authors. More specifically, we hence thirdly 3), also aim at exploring as to whether one can find traces of automated decision making, something which could more radically alter editorial peer review and scholarly publishing. Hopefully, you will be informed of the decision soon. Is there any regulation for enforcing he editor for appropriate reply about accept or reject? Usually, the times vary from two to six months, but there is no fixed rule. 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). After noise-reduction, a core component emerges. 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. 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. According to Guston (2001), there is a social contract granting autonomy and self-regulation to science only if scientific quality and productivity is ensured. Although editorial management systems have been introduced in the dawn of the current millenium, research about process generated data from these systems within scholarly journals has to the best of our knowledge not been published so far. Based on the Nature Methods Review Speed Feedback System, it takes editor 146.00 days to accept manuscript. 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. It appears that some of these calls presuppose knowledge about the complex interplay of actors and technologies in editorial processes. The patent shows the components like postulation, consultation and decision as elements relatively clearly, but the component of administration is distributed over the whole process. What is more, scholarship about peer review lacks from a structural perspective on that process, e.g., how much time and resources are bound by which kind of activities in the process of handling manuscripts at scholarly journals. 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). 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. Editor assigned Editor Declined Invitation Decision Letter Being Prepared "Decision in Process" 4.Reviewer (s) invited On the other hand, it has been argued that editorial management systems support the editorial role and reproduce or may even increase the instruments to regulate, administrate and ultimately control the process (Mendonca, 2017). Article proofs sent to author 4. . However, based on our analysis, we explore what can be known from editorial management systems and in what ways decisions jointly emerge from editorial decision and structures provided by the infrastructure. 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). Usually when a paper is received for publication, the Editor in chief considers the paper and then transmits it to the suitable Associate Editor. 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. According to Star and Bowker, infrastructures are used to enable, maintain and control collaboration among different actors (Star, 1999; Star and Bowker, 2006). ~. [CDATA[> If the editor decides to send the manuscript to peer reviewers, they will contact researchers with relevant expertise. Professional It is not our goal, however, to make a life cycle analysis of manuscripts at this publisher. Learn more. 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. In the second section of the results, we aim at tracing the order of the events in the editorial management system. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication. 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. This led us to iteratively disintegrate the network by deleting the passage points. One possibility is that it will be accepted as is, which is extremely rare. HANDBOOK: Keep calm and wait: A guide to understanding journal statuses, Keep calm and wait: A guide to understanding journal statuses. As Horbach and Halffman (2020, p.4) have argued, such infrastructural systems of classification and standards constitute invisible mediators of action establishing templates () by which performances are compared and which define what one enactment is a performance of (ibid). 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. 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. 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). Centrality is a relative measure, putting different nodes into an ordered relation. Mrowinski M. J., Fronczak A., Fronczak P., Nedic O., Ausloos M. (2016). This is known as a rescinding. These different forms of actors can be best perceived as specified roles, describing and demarcating specific types of activity, that is, for instance, making claims (authors), handling and coordinating manuscripts (editors), evaluating claims (reviewers) and deciding about whether to publish a manuscript or not (editors). 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 . We thank Taiane Linhares and Nikita Sorgatz for help with data preparation. Editor assigned (Peer-review) (discovery) (invention)novelunexpected) 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). 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). Editorial decision making at Nature Genetics. 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? The given network cannot be completely chaotic, instead some structure must be there but need sharpening. They employ single-blind peer review, which means that the reviewers are aware of the authors identities unless otherwise requested by the authors. Given the administrative responsibilities of the editors, it is plausible that some of these events refer to quality or process control related activities such as setting up automated mailings without a call for action. Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems, Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs, Online Editorial Management-Systeme und die Produktion wissenschaftlicher Fachzeitschriften, Open Access und Digitalisierung aus der Sicht von Wissenschaftsverlagen, Wissenschaftliches Publizieren: Zwischen Digitalisierung, Leistungsmessung, konomisierung und medialer Beobachtung, Online Collaboration: Scientists and the Social Network, Editorial Peer Review: Its Strengths and Weaknesses. Received 2021 Jul 26; Accepted 2021 Sep 20. What is the meaning of "decision in process" status? Christin (2020) coined the term algorithmic refraction aiming at bypassing algorithmic opacity to address drawing conclusions under the circumstances of incomplete information. Yet, given our limited reconstruction of the event history, we cannot confirm this hypothesis. 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 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. Review Started and Potential Referees Accept were mostly performed by the reviewer and achieved the highest frequency (both had N = 8,937). Since then the success of peer review in science was unprecedented and can be seen in the various ways peer review has been integrated for the evaluation of scholarly output, with varying expectations as to what it is to accomplish. Events triggered by (columns) and affective to (rows) the different roles assigned. Because it was sitting in my barn / shop for over 12 years!! 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. Our original resources for authors and journals will help you become an expert in academic publishing. 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. If it goes for review, then it will be about a month before you get the comments. Read Editage Insights in your favorite RSS Reader. Answer: From the different status descriptions, it seems that the manuscript has not been sent for peer review. Sometimes they are more busy. 10.1038/512126a [Google . On the other hand, Initial QC failed does not happen so very often and manuscripts facing this stage must have something special with them. 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. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. [CDATA[> The logarithm was chosen because the time between stages is distributed skew to the left (see Figure 2). What does editor decision started mean nature? [CDATA[> Some authors ask the editors to reconsider a rejection decision. This service is available to authors at the time of decision or at a later time. (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed tens of billions of pounds for a controversial new high speed rail line linking London with cities to the north, despite soaring costs and mounting anger from his own Conservative Party colleagues.The High Speed 2 (HS2) development will become Europe's largest infrastructure project but it has suffered delays and criticism of its . manuscpt under consideration 40editor decision started~ With respect to the tasks the editor performs, we can see that the editor is the most powerful actor in the process as represented in the traces of digital infrastructures as opposed to a more automated process powered by the infrastructure. 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. Peer review at scholarly journals, however, does also have a function in protecting scientific autonomy by safeguarding quality. The focus on establishing agreement of at least the majority or the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires . 1 Also, when we conceptually refer to the process, we write element or component for conglomerates of either actions or events which belong together. 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,. Register for comprehensive research tips and expert advice on English writing, journal publishing, good publication practices, trends in publishing, and a lot more. Research suggests that editorial management systems as digital infrastructures are adapted to the local needs at scholarly journals and reflect main realms of activities. If authors prefer not to make the review history of their paper at Nature Microbiology known to a new journal, they should not use the transfer service and they should make a new submission instead; the editors will evaluate the paper without reference to the previous review process. var d=new Date(); yr=d.getFullYear();document.write(yr); The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the We were allowed to analyse the data but not to share or publish the dataset. 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). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Rather, we intend to infer editorial practices from these sequences which may jointly emerge from the editors actions and the infrastructure, being aware that our perspective is limited. 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. For this purpose, we use network analysis: the vertices represent the stages and a (directed) edge is drawn from one stage to another when it is directly following in one items history. NatureNatureNatureNature Mater . response letterresubmit, 3. After several rounds of revision, when the revised manuscript was submitted, the status showed 'quality check started' - 'peer review' - 'decision started.' //-->