Tools supporting ethics and integrity in submission and review

With CRediT, ORCID and Publons integrated into Editorial Manager®, we aim for these transparency tools to be easy, standard steps in the publishing process

Authorship and credit rank highly among editorial staff concerns, and yet there are available solutions to address these important areas for focus. Aries Systems has integrated these solutions into Editorial Manager, the submission system powering thousands of journals at major publishers of biomedical research, including Wolters Kluwer, Springer Nature, BioMed Central, Wiley-VCH, Taylor & Francis and PLOS. We are keen for more publishers and journals to take up the system, and have created introductions to the integration of three key tools relevant to Open Pharma: CRediT, ORCID and Publons.

CRediT

In response to concerns about credit, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, also known as CRediT, allows authors to designate the specific roles they performed from a 14-role list, and optionally also choose degrees of contribution for each selected term. Cloud-based manuscript submission and peer review system Editorial Manager integrates CRediT with the submission workflow. This video illustrates the workflow: CRediT Integration.

ORCID

To disambiguate author identity, ORCID iDs provide an authenticated link between an author’s name and their institution, employment, publication record and, increasingly, peer review activity. Both CRediT and ORCID are persistent identifiers that exist today, and can be implemented within the scholarly publishing ecosystem by books or journals. Once adopted, publications can decide where and how to implement them within workflow. For example, some journals request ORCID iDs, while others require them. iDs can be required at acceptance or at submission. These associations can take place offline, or right within the peer review system. There are other benefits to using ORCID in workflow, including for federated login, and more. Watch these videos to understand the ORCID functionality available within Editorial Manager: ORCID Integration.

Publons

Another high-ranking editorial workflow concern is recognition for reviewers. Many journals experiment with ways of rewarding or simply recognizing referees. Publons is a system to track an individual’s peer reviewing and editorial activity in one place, giving the experts involved in peer review the recognition they deserve. ORCID can receive and store peer review activity in user records, when publications share that data. In this case, when a publication pushes an update that a user has performed a review for a journal, ORCID can receive the data and display it according to the user’s preferences, on their ORCID record. This is a capability forthcoming in Editorial Manager (v15.0). Currently, it is possible to share this information with Publons from Editorial Manager. This short video illustrates the process: How to create a report to extract data for reviewer recognition services (such as Publons).

By integrating these and other transparency tools into the Editorial Manager system, we aim to support growth in their use, and look forward to playing a part in understanding the new types of data they will provide.

This post was originally published on Open Pharma on August 7, 2017.