Yet, the analysis of processual data from an editorial management system may lead to research paying more attention to organizational issues of scholarly publishing, that is, practices related with maintaining and binding reviewers, authors and editors to a scholarly journal. 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. Again actors assigned editorial roles stand out, because their actions significantly affect actors with other roles assigned. 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. 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. What does the status 'Decision started' mean? 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. 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. . Due to the specific work environment at the publisher, where editors are employed as full-time staff in a shared office space, it must be easy for them to communicate with each other bypassing the editorial management system, which limits the potential of surveillance through the system. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. 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. How can we live a good life? on 30 Mar, 2017, This content belongs to the Journal submission & peer review Stage. 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. [2] [3] It has 193 member states and 12 associate members, [4] as well as partners in the non . With regard to roles and activities of the editor, there is support as well as control by the infrastructure. Also, we have found that participants in the process (see Schendzielorz and Reinhart, 2020) are translated into roles in the digitalized process (see Plotkin, 2009) and implemented as person-IDs in the digital infrastructure, only the latter distinctly displaying the infrastructure itself as an actor. 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 is partly caused by several automated steps present in the process, which can take only one second to happen. Editor in Chief, Nature. In the database entry, we would later discover this as a digital trace of the action performed. How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain editorial agency for administrating the process? The two additional source and target nodes make start and end of the process visible. R Package Version 1.14.0. The editor contacts potential reviewers to ask them to review the manuscript. Established in 1947, the company is known for modern classic style that's both tim We found that there is no standardized role for automated processing or decision making: the digital infrastructure itself is not explicitly listed as actor in the patent, but is only visible in the digital traces. At the same time, however, editorial management systems as digital infrastructures transform that process by defining sequences, ends, values and evaluation criteria, which are inscribed already in the production process of such devices (see Krger et al., 2021). Subscribe and get curated content that will give impetus to your research paper. 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. Before While focussing our analysis only on the case of one biomedical publisher, we may infer some more general observations for this realm of research. The status 'Decision started' indicates that the peer review process for your manuscript is complete and the paper is now with the editor. At the contrary, however, events triggered by authors and referees only affect events with actors assigned the same role. Order of the process without and with noise reduction. This could indicate two possibilities. 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. My paper was published in a journal in 2021 october. The publisher uses the system EJournalPress to manage their editorial peer review lead by full-time staff editors in a shared office space. The editor is probably going through the reviews to arrive at a decision. 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. LetPub Scientific Journal Selector (2018-2021), Nature Energy published in 2016, UNITED STATES. 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. 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. Scholarly journals invest considerable effort in maintaining peer culture by establishing close links to authors, reviewers, and (guest) editors (Weller, 2001). 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? Following an ethnographic approach to infrastructures, we reconstruct sequences of the stages passed by the manuscript, taking into account how long it takes for manuscripts to pass from one stage to another. 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). In light of their advice, I am delighted to say that we can in principle offer to publish it in Nature, provided that you revise the paper to address a number of further editorial points. At the same time, expectations that a stronger use of digital infrastructures would inevitably push forward innovations in peer review may be disappointed. In our study, we investigate editorial processes and practices with their data traces captured by an editorial management system. Christin (2020) coined the term algorithmic refraction aiming at bypassing algorithmic opacity to address drawing conclusions under the circumstances of incomplete information. The patent depicts peer review as an ordered process with actions (such as sub-processes, documents and stored data) and bifurcations (see Figure 3). [CDATA[// >