Online management of manuscripts is a required indexing criterion of SciELO

By Abel L Packer

Adapted photo from the original: GotCredit.

The main objective of SciELO is to contribute to sustainably increase in the visibility, usage and impact of indexed journals and the research they report. The main criterion is to select peer reviewed quality journals that communicate original research. Thus, journals should publicly disclose to the authors and others who are concerned the editorial policy, the editorial management structure and composition and the manuscripts assessment procedures.

From 2015 on the online assessment of manuscripts through a system or service that records transactions involving authors, editors and reviewers became a mandatory indexing criterion of SciELO, allowing the recovery of past assessments as well as the production of follow up reports and statistics. By the end of the year all journals in SciELO Brazil should operate with a system or service capable of producing basic reports required by SciELO, which include the quantification of events (received, rejected, approved, affiliation of the authors, editors and reviewers). It is also recommended the adoption of systems with interfaces for locating referees in bibliographic and curricula databases, plagiarism detection tools and billing of publication fee (Article Processing Charge). In the other countries that integrate the SciELO network, this obligatoriness should occur within the next two years.

The main objectives of the mandatory criterion of online management of manuscripts are:

• To promote and explicit the transparent and qualified management of arbitration procedures;
• To strengthen and improve the management of journals with the support of updated reports and statistics that follow standards which allow comparison to other national and international journals, as well as meeting specific characteristics of each journal; and
• To promote and strengthen the credibility of journals indexed in SciELO.

This indexing criterion is aligned with the priority programmatic actions of SciELO and aims to maximize the professionalization, internationalization and sustainability of journals. The outlook for the next three years is that the production of SciELO quality journals follows the international state of the art and become competitive with reference journals.

This criterion does not interfere with the editorial policies of journals, particularly those related to the management of manuscripts, however in many cases the procedures should be adapted to systems or adopted services. In general, this process represents an opportunity for updates and improvements.

The implementation of the priority lines of action of SciELO towards the improvement of journals takes into account the conditions in which they operate so that they all have an opportunity to promote the required advancements. Thus, in the case of online management, SciELO has been promoting it for years and it has become a mandatory criterion when most journals already operate with their own systems or use the ones that are recommended by SciELO. In a recent consultation to the 280 indexed journals, 77% are already making the evaluation of manuscripts with the support of some system. In a next post we will share these results.

SciELO’s technical team will promote over 2015 training courses and will provide advice to journals that do not yet operate online management systems to ensure that everyone develop the ability to meet the indexing criterion by the end of the year. At the same time, it will interact with teams operating the different manuscripts management systems in order to produce follow up standard reports and statistics that will be required.