End to end peer review management
“ Editorial Office supports our editors by ensuring that the administrative processes on Scholar One are managed efficiently and effectively. The team is extremely professional, knowledgeable and a real pleasure to work with.”
Livia Melandri, Senior Publishing Editor, Humanities and Social Sciences, SAGE Publishing Ltd
Partnering with us provides your journals with the experience of decades of peer review management. Let us help you streamline your workflow, improve your peer review system and make the submission and peer review process easy for your authors, reviewers and editors.
Our detailed processes ensure all of your submissions are thoroughly checked daily before they are assigned to the relevant editor. Bespoke software tools provide additional time-cutting assistance, enabling the work to be completed to an exceptionally high quality in a shorter period of time.
Following submission, our experienced team supports the editors through the peer review process, assisting with queries, chasing and securing reviews and ensuring that the final accepted manuscript is delivered to your production team in the required format.
20Years
10Full employees
39 Societies and publishers
10 Peer Review Platforms
What peer review support is offered?
From first submission, through review and all the way to the production team – we offer support for every step of the peer review process. It’s our passion, after all!
Submission processing
Every journal paper submission is treated equally and individually.
Technical checks
Supported by Carina Workflow Intelligence software, our checks are fast and accurate. Whether you have a high or low volume of daily submissions, we can set and maintain ambitious targets to put your authors’ needs first.
We have developed free online tools which walk authors through the process of writing ethics and data availability statements. Clear statements mean quicker process through the initial submission checks and greater clarity for readers.
Many of our journals now use our pre-revise checks process. Minimal checks at initial submission mean that authors are required to make more changes for their revised submissions. Checks at the pre-revision stage ensure that authors have all the information necessary for submitting the perfect revised submission – completing the formatting requirements at the same time as their revisions.
Appeals
Our appeals team can support your high volume journals’ appeal process. We can support you and your editor, ensuring that communication is kept up to date during the time taken for discussions to take place.
Once a decision is made, our team will facilitate the processing of the manuscript, whether to review or final rejection.
Author assistance
We work with authors throughout the process, ensuring that they are kept in the loop with automated updates, looking to reduce delays where possible and, therefore, avoiding additional incoming emails.
Editor assistance
We provide you and your editors with the support they need to effortlessly manage their workload. Your named contact will be available daily, working closely with your team.
We will happily make recommendations to improve your workflows to support workload, as well as following up with emails and running reports.
We can provide short term and long term holiday and sickness cover too. Learn more under Workflow Support.
Anything to make your and your editors’ lives easier.
Securing reviewers
Ensuring the review process moves along in a timely-manner to aid swift decisions.
Reviewer invitations
With over 6 years of experience working with BMJ Open – one of the UK’s top open access medical journals – we can support your editors with their reviewer searches. Our highly trained, scientific team will work with you to source reviewers who are right for your submissions.
Reviewer assistance
Once reviewers have been agreed, the team will work to ensure that the process continues as quickly as possible. For example, we set up automatic reminders which encourage the reviewer to engage with us, including personalised, polite chasers and regular updates. Using our extensive experience, all of this helps to move the paper forward to decision. as quickly as possible.
Production preparation
Preparing every paper to ease through production
Final checks
Our team work with the authors to make final amendments so that files sent to production are in the correct format and require minimal changes. This includes the correct manuscript statements, file naming conventions and ensuring good quality figures and imagery (see below).
Publish ahead of print
For partners who provide early publication, we can check and upload manuscripts before committing them to the live journal website.
Image screening
We are experienced in complete image screening. We will check for:
- Low resolution
- Compression artifacts
- Over-contrasting
- Splicing
- Areas erased
- Duplication
- Overlayering
Extensive support
More than just outsourcing, we offer you support to help manage your workload, reduce back log and work more efficiently in the future.
Management
There is not a part of the peer review process that we are not experienced in. As well as all of the above, we can offer general management of journals including queue checks, queries, management of desk notes and process documents, escalated papers, and meeting support.
Trouble shooting
With so much experience in our wider team, we have encountered and solved many problems. Whether this is a system issue, an author query, or something more unusual, we have an escalation processes in place so that we can resolve most issues without taking up your staff’s time.
Escalation processes with our partners are also well established with many choosing to share a Slack, Chatter, or Teams channel with us to reduce unnecessary emails and to encourage open discussion about issues.
Training
Our training programme has been developed over 20 years and contains fully documented checklists and processes for each journal. Remote onboarding and training techniques have been perfected during 2020 and we are confident that our remote, international training processes result in fully trained team members.
Reports
With expertise in S1M and EditorialManager, we can confidently write and schedule reports for all eventualities, often using them to circumvent bottlenecks in the current peer review platforms.
How is your peer review support different?
- We are highly experienced.
- We have worked with numerous journals and systems and always aim to share our knowledge with you to support best practice and to make your workflow as efficient as possible.
- We ensure each paper is rigorously checked – within 24 hours of submission.
- We have a dedicated team. You will be assigned an account manager – a direct point of contact – who works closely with our team to ensure your journal gets the attention it deserves.
- All tasks are accurately timed meaning not only full transparency of costings, but also allowing you to assess where time is being saved.
- Our flexibility and experience enables us to welcome additional journals on either a long or short term basis.
- Our competitive pricing structure allows you to budget accurately.
- If you require any references relating to our work, please do not hesitate to contact us.
What can we expect by using your peer review services?
No more overwhelm. Efficient service. Expert support. Streamlined submission and acceptance processes.
2020 at a glance:
63,444.17 Hours worked
658,971 Individual tasks
5.77 Average mins/task
Other services.
Workflow support
Don’t let a sudden spike in submissions or a gap in staffing affect your productivity.
Sourcing and securing reviewers
Use our skilled team to source and secure verified reviewers for your submissions.
Email management
We offer email management to support editors, authors and reviewers, ensuring all peer review related enquiries are answered swiftly.