The first possibility is the short decision path from "Manuscript Consultation Started" directly to "Editor Decision Complete". On the other hand, Initial QC failed does not happen so very often and manuscripts facing this stage must have something special with them. . This underlines the strong position and great responsibility of the editor. The identical numbers for both events indicate that they are released upon acceptance of the reviewer. You could ask how soon they think they will answer, or give a deadline yourself, warning them that, after that deadline without having heard, you will submit the text to another publisher. on 21 Oct, 2016. If the editor decides to send the manuscript to peer reviewers, they will contact researchers with relevant expertise. (Manuscript under submission->Manuscript received)->Editor assigned->Manuscript under consideration->Editor Decision StartedDecision sent to author->Waiting for revision, ->Revision receivedManuscript #A1Manuscript under submission->Manuscript received->Editor assigned->Manuscript under consideration->Editor Decision Started, . Editor in Chief, Nature. response letterresubmit, 3. Many researchers, reviewers and editors do have opinions about the roles and responsibilities of both editors and reviewers (Glonti et al., 2019), some of which contradict each other (Glonti et al., 2019, p.1). Nature Microbiology (Nat Microbiol) Yet, calls for reforms in scholarly peer review have grown louder particularly emerging from critics about biases in peer review (Cicchetti et al., 1992; Harnad, 1983; Bornmann 2005). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). It is clear from the status descriptions that your revised manuscript was sent for peer review again. The study has several implications on the study of publishing practices and processes addressed in the article collection about Change and Innovation in Manuscript Peer Review it is part of. The reviewers further triggered Review Received (N = 8,672), First Referee Accepted (N = 2,766) and Review Complete (N = 3,222), the latter indicating that a consultation event has actually taken place. As we were aiming at identifying core elements of the process, we disintegrate the graph into components by deleting the passage points in descending order by size to make its meaningful components fall apart from each other. Therefore we deleted the first nine passage points (including source and target). According to Guston (2001), there is a social contract granting autonomy and self-regulation to science only if scientific quality and productivity is ensured. (2017). What does editor decision started mean nature? Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems, Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs, Online Editorial Management-Systeme und die Produktion wissenschaftlicher Fachzeitschriften, Open Access und Digitalisierung aus der Sicht von Wissenschaftsverlagen, Wissenschaftliches Publizieren: Zwischen Digitalisierung, Leistungsmessung, konomisierung und medialer Beobachtung, Online Collaboration: Scientists and the Social Network, Editorial Peer Review: Its Strengths and Weaknesses. This may as well reflect how editors take their responsibility as members of the scientific community. SHORT ANSWER. The production process after acceptance, however, was very annoying and involved a lot of back and forth with Nature's production team, which also caused a rather long delay between acceptance and publication. The editor is reading your manuscript and figuring out whether or not she wants to send it for peer review. They point out that taking into account different regimes of power in peer review processes as government requires exploring how interests are transformed into processes, that is, sequences of events and formalized activities (ibid., p.23). Asked by Sanjay Karna manuscpt under consideration 40editor decision started. Article proofs sent to author 4. 2 wormified 4 yr. ago A month sounds optimistic to me :-) 2 [deleted] 4 yr. ago [removed] riricide 4 yr. ago Our results may inform future studies and allow for making more detailed observations of the editorial process. Scholarly journals invest considerable effort in maintaining peer culture by establishing close links to authors, reviewers, and (guest) editors (Weller, 2001). Thank you for visiting nature.com. There is much consensus about peer review for manuscripts being a major instrument for quality control despite differences what that means in practice (Campanario, 1998a; Campanario, 1998b). The logarithm was chosen because the time between stages is distributed skew to the left (see Figure 2). Nevertheless, our approach leads to methodological questions of digital inquiries. That is why we also focus our structural analysis of the peer review process on this first round of peer review. In the last 15years, novel digital infrastructures of different forms and shapes have been established, aiming at supporting communication, dissemination and evaluation of scientific research (Van Noorden, 2014; Taubert, 2016; Blmel, 2021). Some editors keep a paper for long time, more than 6 months or a year, without a decision and when send them a reminder message they do not reply or sometimes reply for the first time saying that . Again actors assigned editorial roles stand out, because their actions significantly affect actors with other roles assigned. The most central node is Preliminary Manuscript Data Submitted which has 27,910 ingoing and outgoing edges, whereas the least central node is Initial QC failed (where QC stands for quality control) which has only 147 edges. If this is nature group and it is "editor decision started" then it means the editor did something, including receiving a review report or selecting a new reviewer (from what I have experienced) Why are papers rejected? Exploring a digital infrastructure without actually having access to it is challenging. The focus of the patent is on how to facilitate the peer review process in a digital infrastructure. That means, the first round is crucial to the manuscripts fate and, moreover, the preceding rounds might predetermine the shape of the process in the later rounds. While different studies about the roles and tasks of both reviewers and editors were published (Hirschauer, 2010; Glonti et al., 2019), editorial practices are only rarely investigated (Weller, 2001). The strong presence of observational events underlines the property of editorial management systems being a knowledge based infrastructure enhancing the editors competence rather than only being a small tool. In our case, the digital traces particularly point to the editors procedural choices. They employ single-blind peer review, which means that the reviewers are aware of the authors identities unless otherwise requested by the authors. We concentrate on the core process now and delete the now isolated vertices, thus reducing the core process to the main component of the network with 48 vertices and a density of d = 0.04. Recht Manage. How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain the editors agency for administrating the process? Authors as well as reviewers have no possibilities to bypass the system easily, as far as we can see. With regard to roles and activities of the editor, there is support as well as control by the infrastructure. Consequently, the analysis shows how much organizational effort goes into what Schendzielorz and Reinhart (2020) have called the administrative parts of the peer review process to which this article pays particular attention. While focussing our analysis only on the case of one biomedical publisher, we may infer some more general observations for this realm of research. In the patent, it says: A users role includes one or more of the following relationships between the manuscript and the associated person: author, editor, associate editor, reviewer, or staff member. (Plotkin, 2009 p.5). The description of the variables was mainly derived from the field names, their values and the xml-structure in the raw data and is given in Table 1. Consequently, infrastructures may best be understood as manifestations of specific operations or sometimes even of a whole process (Niewhner, 2014, 6). The Emergence of a Field: a Network Analysis of Research on Peer Review, 4.8 Academic Social Networks and Bibliometrics, Gedanken zum Refereesystem in konomischen wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften, Von der Theorie zur Wirtschaftspolitik - ein sterreichischer Weg, Peer Review for Journals as it Stands Today-Part 1, Peer Review for Journals as it Stands Today-Part 2, The Ethnographer and the Algorithm: beyond the Black Box. [CDATA[// >