Page 7 - Straive eBook: Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

Straive | Redefining Your Peer Review Experience 7

Technical checks Quality Control

Check for compliance with
Depending on the journal’s internal workflows, • ethical standards
• essential declarations
the first step after submission might be a like data availability Technical
technical screening by the JEO. This usually statements, missing screening
information, and
by JEO
includes a check for compliance with ethical completeness of
metadata
standards, inclusion of essential declarations
like data availability statements, missing
information, and completeness of metadata. • Revision for critical failure
How a publisher handles articles failing a such as missing statement
of ethical review board
Return
technical check varies wildly. Some will return approval for clinical articles to
articles to authors for revision only where there research author
• Revision on formatting
is a critical failure, such as a missing statement of references
of ethical review board approval for clinical
research, with other issues logged as requiring
attention during revision.

Others will return to authors for matters that are not to do with scholarly rigour, such as
formatting of references. Arguments can be made in favour of both options: the first is better
from an author service perspective, while the second may assist editors and reviewers in their
assessments.

Technical checks have typically been done manually but are very similar to those frequently
done in the very early stages of production, which have been automated for some time.
Straive offers customers the opportunity to implement their Completeness and Usability
Check (CuC) tool, usually used in production, early in the process to automate technical
checks for more than 80 different aspects of an article (Figure 3), delivering a comprehensive
report to authors to allow them to amend any issues either before review or during revision.
New tools like penelope.ai offer similar automatic functionality with journal-specific
configuration. Running these tools on submission would not only save staff time, but also
allow articles to proceed to editorial screening without delay — a hypothesis tested by IOP
Publishing in 2020 (Holt et al., 2021). Alternatively, publishers could offer automated technical
checks at the start of the submission process, allowing authors to be sure their articles
comply with journal requirements before they complete the submission process.

Metadata Ethics Components References Text
• Authors • Conflicts • Figures, • Reference • Typographic
• Titles of interest tables and completeness errors
• Abstracts • Ethical equations • In-text citations • Article
• Keywords approval • Open data / • Footnotes structure
• Consent for methods • Endnotes
publication statements
• Supplementary Figure 3.
files Core components of Straive's
• Legends Completeness and Usability
• In-text citations Check (CUC) tool.