Editor's desk: Improving author experience

Abstract

In this and subsequent Editor's Desk pieces, I will explain what progress we have made on each of these goals to date and what our aspirations are for the future. This piece is about the third goal, enhancing the author's experience. I am beginning with this topic not because it is the most important of the three goals, but because we have made significant changes and progress on it and a report at this time is warranted. Authors are the lifeblood of any academic journal. You do the important scientific work that we aim to document in HSR. Recognizing this, at HSR, we want to be as welcoming as possible to you as an author and strive to make your engagement with HSR—from submission, through peer review, and hopefully, publication—as efficient and rewarding as it can be, without sacrificing quality. Therefore, we have undertaken several steps to improve your experience, minimize author burden, and accelerate time to publication. Let us get the less pleasant topic out of the way. Many manuscripts received by HSR will be rejected. Rejection is an unfortunate necessity of scholarly publishing. To maintain quality and relevance to the field of HSR, HSR accepts only about one in seven manuscripts it receives.1 While we may, at some point, reject your manuscript, we are not rejecting you. We want our relationship with you to continue. We still value your work and want you to think of HSR for your next manuscript and be willing to serve as an HSR reviewer.2 So, we want to be as helpful to you as possible, even when we cannot publish your paper. In particular, we still wish to assist you in finding a home for your work. Two enhancements facilitate this. First, when we must reject a manuscript, we more routinely provide feedback to authors about why we are doing so. This has always been the case when a paper has undergone peer review, as the authors receive the reviewer comments. What is new is that we are more consistently articulating our rationale for rejection for papers that pass initial review by managing editors but are desk rejected by me or a senior associate editor. While not as thorough as peer reviews, we sincerely hope that our comments on desk-rejected papers assist authors in improving their work and finding a journal in which to publish it. Second, when possible, we recommend other journals that may be more suitable for the work. Moreover, authors of rejected articles receive an invitation to submit their work to another appropriate Wiley journal through a streamlined process. If an author selects one of those journals, they need not re-enter the same information they have already entered for HSR submission, nor re-upload documents that have not changed. While rejection is never pleasant, we hope that these enhancements make it as easy as possible for authors to publish their work. And we hope that we provide sufficient value to authors of rejected papers that they are willing to consider HSR for their future work. Now let us consider the more pleasant experience: acceptance for publication. While acceptance is always a victory savored by researchers, sometimes it is soured by a long or unpleasant review process. For manuscripts submitted to HSR in 2019 that were ultimately accepted, it took an average of 282 days (9.4 months) from submission to acceptance.1 We think that is far too long. Earlier this year, we analyzed the average time a manuscript spends in each phase of the process from submission to acceptance. We found that manuscripts spent only a small minority—10%—of the total time in this process with editors (e.g., making reviewer assignments or assessing reviews). The rest of the time, the paper was with reviewers or with authors for revisions. This does not mean that editors do not play a significant role in the time to publication. It is our responsibility to communicate clearly to authors what revisions are necessary to bring the paper up to publication quality. Clear communication helps authors focus efforts, reducing time in revision, as well as in subsequent review. We are also responsible, in part, for the number of iterations a manuscript undergoes between reviewers and authors. Here, we found that HSR tended to put manuscripts through more iterations than another HSR journal. Again, better communication can reduce manuscript versions because authors know what is expected and editors can more easily assess revisions against the stated expectations without returning to reviewers. To address these sources of publication delays, we have made several changes. First, we are communicating more clearly with authors about what aspects of reviewer comments deserve the greatest attention in revision. Second, we are being more selective in when and how we return revisions to reviewers. More often than previously, manuscripts are undergoing only one round of revision. Or, when re-review is needed, we are seeking input from only one of several reviewers of the original manuscript and/or directing reviewers' attention to parts of the revision that warrant attention. This saves reviewer time and effort, achieving greater efficiency without loss of quality. Third, we have reduced our revision-and-review deadlines so they are more in line with our peer journals. Though extensions are granted when warranted, we are asking authors to undertake major revisions in 6 weeks (down from 12), minor revisions in 4 weeks (down from 8), and conditional acceptance revisions in 2 weeks (down from 4). We are asking reviewers to assess manuscripts in 2 weeks (down from 4). Though we think these new deadlines are reasonable given the more specific direction we are providing to authors and reviewers, we will update them if they prove to be too tight. Finally, working with our publisher, Wiley, we will be posting accepted papers in the format provided by authors, possibly within about a week of acceptance—something done by many other journals. These versions will be replaced by copyedited and typeset versions a few weeks later. This effectively reduces time to online publication by nearly 1 month. Taken together, we hope these efforts will bring time to publication down to something closer to 6 months. Ultimately, our efforts are intended to foster better relationships with authors. Our goal is for you, as an author, to feel you have been fairly treated in a timely, reasonable, and respectful manner. While we cannot accept every paper, we can still help make some of the papers we must reject a little better. We think that the clearer communication that is at the heart of some of our efforts will not only make for better relationships but better-published papers—a win-win. But we are not the judge of whether our efforts are improving author experience. Authors are. If you feel something has gotten off track in your experience with HSR, I want to hear from you. Many of the approaches described above came from suggestions from authors like you. Perhaps the next great idea to make HSR better is yours.

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