The hurdles of academic publishing from the perspective of journal editors: a case study
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The hurdles of academic publishing from the perspective of journal editors: a case study Maciej J. Mrowinski1 · Agata Fronczak1 · Piotr Fronczak1 · Olgica Nedic2 · Aleksandar Dekanski3 Received: 1 October 2019 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this paper, we provide insight into the editorial process as seen from the perspective of journal editors. We study a dataset obtained from the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society, which contains information about submitted and rejected manuscripts, in order to find differences between local (Serbian) and external (non-Serbian) submissions. We show that external submissions (mainly from India, Iran and China) constitute the majority of all submissions, while local submissions are in the minority. Most of submissions are rejected for technical reasons (e.g. wrong manuscript formatting or problems with images) and many users resubmit the same paper without making necessary corrections. Manuscripts with just one author are less likely to pass the technical check, which can be attributed to missing metadata. Articles from local authors are better prepared and require fewer resubmissions on average before they are accepted for peer review. The peer review process for local submissions takes less time than for external papers and local submissions are more likely to be accepted for publication. Also, while there are more men than women among external users, this trend is reversed for local users. In the combined group of local and external users, articles submitted by women are more likely to be published than articles submitted by men. Keywords Peer review · Editorial process · Publishing · Submissions analysis · Editor workload
Introduction Publishing an article is not an easy task. Authors associate the publishing process with peer review, which is often considered to be a source of frustration by scientists trying to share their work (Björk and Solomon 2013; Nguyen et al. 2015; Powell 2016). However, peer review is one of the most important mechanisms for ensuring the quality of published papers and despite the fact that it is not a perfect system (Alberts et al. 2008;
* Maciej J. Mrowinski [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Scientometrics
Resnik et al. 2008), the scientific community still trusts it and believes it is necessary (Nicholas et al. 2015). While peer review is the aspect of academic publishing that authors of articles are most exposed to, journal editors can paint a different picture and offer a broader perspective. Journals and editors must adapt to the ever-changing landscape of academic publishing. In particular, with the number of published manuscripts increasing every year (Ware and Mabe 2015), open access gaining in popularity (Laakso et al. 2011; Laakso and Björk 2012) and the advent of mega-journals (Björk 2015), it is becoming progressively more difficult to secure reviewers (Lajtha and Baveye 2010; Arns 2014; Merrill 2014), though the extent of this problem m
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