Page 6 - Straive eBook: Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

6 Straive | Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

Submission

The peer review workflow is often thought of as beginning with submission, but this ignores a
great deal of preparatory effort. In most cases, an article will be drafted, circulated around the
research team, revised, recirculated, and revised again for many weeks or months before it is
considered ready for submission. Even then, many research teams will seek advice – that is,
informal peer review – from colleagues in other teams and make further revisions before they
send the article to a journal. The value of this informal review may be recognised in an article’s
Acknowledgements section, but this is not a universal practice. Some authors will also get
in touch with the journal, usually in the form of a journal editorial office (JEO), with a pre-
submission query about scope and editorial thresholds to ensure they are targeting the
correct venue for their work.

The submission process itself, with its associated form filling, is a source of discontent among
researchers. They rightly wish to know why they should copy and paste information such as
the article abstract from their document into a publisher’s submission form. Some platforms,
like Editorial Manager, have taken this on board and now extract metadata from the article file,
but the richer the information supplied at submission, the more streamlined the peer review
workflow can be. For example, editors often ask publishers to implement a feature requesting
that authors list their preferred and non-preferred reviewers.

For those research teams who embrace open scholarship, preprint servers like arΧiv are
another mechanism for gathering feedback on an article either prior to submission or
alongside peer review, as well as offering authors a means to short-circuit the often lengthy
publication process, claim priority for their findings and garner attention for their work. With
preprints now a (generally) accepted part of the article life cycle, direct submission from
preprint servers to journals is a simple way for publishers to streamline authors’ workflows.

Suggestions

• Encourage the inclusion of pre-submission reviewers in Acknowledgements sections
to recognise the effort that goes into this work.
• Encourage pre-submission questions to minimise the number of out-of-scope articles
submitted to a journal, particularly where many articles are rejected at editorial
screening.
• Implement direct submission from preprint servers.
• Work with system suppliers to maximise the metadata that can be extracted from
article files.
• Work with editors and the editorial office to determine which fields need to be included
in submission forms to streamline the peer review workflow and which can be
eliminated to reduce author effort.