Sage, a leading international publisher, needed to centralize the submission and peer review process in order to create a powerful, enterprise-wide solution for hundreds of journals. As such, Sage signed and recently renewed a contract for ScholarOne Manuscripts, enabling the organization to deliver a highly scalable workflow solution to offshore offices. After a thorough proposal process, Sage determined that ScholarOne Manuscripts provided a configurable, web-based submission and peer review workflow solution.
With ScholarOne Manuscripts, their administrative, editing, and reviewing processes were streamlined.
Creating a reliable publishing cycle
“We needed to be assured that our journal issues would publish reliably — that we would generate quality, timely products over the long term,” said John Shaw, Executive Director of Publishing Technologies at Sage, with 530 titles that cover the humanities, social sciences, science, technology and medical disciplines.
The span in coverage means the needs of editors in these varied disciplines is wide ranging. For example, each editor needs to locate subject-specific peer reviewers, and each has a different publishing cycle that informs time to get to market, Shaw notes, adding, “We needed a system that could scale accordingly.”
The Challenge
Before the implementation of ScholarOne Manuscripts the organization was running four different online peer review systems. During the exploratory phase and bid process before the purchase of ScholarOne Manuscripts, Sage scrutinized many facets of competitors’ offerings and asked a lot of questions. What is the quantity of journals the workflow system can handle? How much bandwidth and storage space can we count on? Just as important was the consideration of the business relationships: Are the team members collaborative? Do they have a shared vision? And how deep is staff tenure?
“We spent the better part of a year considering the best choice for a peer review workflow system that would stay in place for a very long time. In the end we made a solid decision. From the beginning ScholarOne presented us with a robust option,” said Shaw.
The Solution
Central to Sage’s final decision was the desire for autonomy. “We knew we wanted to do system implementation ourselves — we felt strongly that we needed to maintain control of the workflow,” Shaw explained. So, ScholarOne set up templates as a baseline, a reference point from which additional journals could be added to the workflow.
In 12 months, Sage had migrated 60 of its journals to ScholarOne.
“By the end of the first year, we became a well-oiled machine.” Now rollouts are very easy, according to Shaw. “Our staff can execute them quickly and easily — with the division of labor between Sage and ScholarOne clearly mapped out. To have Sage personnel on the front end was extremely important to us. ScholarOne’s reliable back-end systems and support mean the organization is an extension of the Sage publishing arm.”
Reporting functionality in ScholarOne Manuscripts is a bonus. “We need to get up-to-date information so we can analyze the journals healthiness accordingly,” said Shaw. Sage’s society partners benefit from a clear understanding of a given journal’s flow — the subject areas being covered, the geographic regions from which papers are submitted. “We need this data in order to fine-tune a journal’s direction to maximize the quality of each journal. If a publisher is or isn’t getting a lot of paper submissions in one area or another, that publisher, society, or editor may decide to expand or retract coverage.”
A Global Partnership
This concept extends across literal oceans. Sage has had a publishing office in New Delhi, India for more than three decades. This wholly owned regional publishing office sells English-based journals and books to the growing number of high-quality academic universities in the community.
“We are trying to meet this need by expanding our journal program in India,” said Shaw. “We’re looking to provide the same online peer review workflow solutions we have in the U.S. and other countries for this local office. We have a lot of confidence in ScholarOne’s ability to customize any system we may need. The teamwork and communication we have with ScholarOne is excellent; the team has proven it will listen to the particulars of what we want. The answer is not to work behind a black box.”
Learn how ScholarOne can help you solve problems and tackle new opportunities. Email solutions@silverchair.com.