MSP

Ed­it­Flow’s in­ter­face is tail­or-made for journ­als of the size that’s typ­ic­al in math­em­at­ics, al­low­ing you to first sur­vey at a glance the whole pipeline of the journ­al, then dive straight in­to work­ing on an art­icle, elim­in­at­ing ex­traneous clicks and obstacles in between.

Switch­ing to new soft­ware can be in­tim­id­at­ing. That’s why we’re with you and your users every step of the way, with quick hands-on sup­port via email or video-chat.

Sup­port in­quir­ies are handled dir­ectly by pro­gram­mers and oth­er people deeply fa­mil­i­ar with Ed­it­Flow, who are know­ledge­able about it and able to in­flu­ence its dir­ec­tion, or ex­plore and fix a bug. Is­sues are re­solved quickly and com­pet­ently, and you’re not sub­jec­ted to sev­er­al lay­ers be­fore reach­ing some­body who can help you.

In­fre­quent users of the sys­tem (au­thors and ref­er­ees) are not asked to re­gister and then re­mem­ber yet an­oth­er lo­gin and pass­word; in­stead, Ed­it­Flow al­lows their ac­cess by au­then­tic­at­ing with unique tokens they re­ceive by email. (Of course, staff and ed­it­ors can only ac­cess the sys­tem by us­ing a user­name and pass­word.)

Ed­it­Flow gives the op­tion of first re­quest­ing fast ad­vice about an art­icle from an out­side ex­pert, be­fore com­mit­ting to re­quest­ing full ref­er­ee re­ports, and keeps the two types of re­quests sep­ar­ate. This al­lows ed­it­ors to ef­fi­ciently fil­ter out sub­mis­sions that are not a good fit (and can be part of more in­volved work­flows). Con­tinu­ing an ad­vice re­quest with a full-re­port ref­er­ee re­quest is straight­for­ward.

As an op­tion, Ed­it­Flow can be giv­en ac­cess to an ex­tens­ive shared “ad­dress book” of math­em­aticians, most use­ful when ed­it­ors seek ref­er­ees. This data­base is act­ively cur­ated by our staff, who chase du­plic­a­tions and in­vest­ig­ate bounced email mes­sages.

Ed­it­Flow makes it easy to re­cord the in­ev­it­able in­ter­ac­tions that hap­pen out­side the sys­tem: a ref­er­ee re­quest made by phone, a re­port re­ceived dir­ectly by email. Rel­ev­ant out­side email mes­sages can be ad­ded to an art­icle’s re­cord.

Ed­it­ors can act on be­half of their ref­er­ees, chief ed­it­ors can act on be­half of their ed­it­ors, and staff can seam­lessly as­sist along the way.

We don’t hold your data host­age. While we do se­curely store all journ­al re­cords, you are the own­er of your data and can even store backups on your own serv­ers. This makes it easi­er for you to take your journ­al his­tory with you if you ever de­cide to leave Ed­it­Flow, but we’re con­fid­ent you won’t want to. In fact, no journ­al has ever switched away.

Ed­it­Flow al­lows ed­it­ors to not only modi­fy the text of each out­go­ing email, but also per­son­al­ize and save for fu­ture use the tem­plate it­self that gen­er­ates that class of emails (e.g., the sev­er­al ac­cept­ance, re­jec­tion and ref­er­ee-re­quest vari­ants). Ad­di­tion­al journ­al-wide tem­plates can be ad­ded as needed.

Ed­it­ors can make de­cisions in­de­pend­ently, sub­mit to the re­view of a chief ed­it­or, make re­com­mend­a­tions to an ex­ec­ut­ive com­mit­tee, or col­lect votes from the whole ed­it­or­i­al board. The pro­cess can be set up to be flex­ible or have strict rules and dead­ines.

Ed­it­Flow can be con­figured so that a reg­u­lar ed­it­or can see only the art­icles they handle, or also see art­icles that have been re­com­men­ded for a de­cision, or see all art­icles in pro­cess.

If shown an art­icle they’re not hand­ling, an ed­it­or can see the manuscripts, or also see the ref­er­ee re­port but not the iden­tity of the re­view­ers, or see everything: re­ports, iden­tit­ies and dis­cus­sions.

We can also con­fig­ure Ed­it­Flow so that an ed­it­or, while not shown some giv­en art­icle in the journ­al list­ing, could non­ethe­less ac­cess its page and data if ex­pli­citly sent the art­icle’s URL (this can be use­ful, for ex­ample, if the chief ed­it­or wants to con­sult only a spe­cif­ic ed­it­or be­fore as­sign­ing the art­icle to a hand­ling ed­it­or).

Of course, ed­it­ors can nev­er see any de­tails of an art­icle that they au­thored.

Ed­it­Flow can ac­com­mod­ate all man­ner of work­flows and de­cision mod­els, from the simplest ed­it­or-de­cides-alone mod­els to multi-stage/multi-layered pro­cesses, in­clud­ing votes and gate­keep­ers.

We can freely con­fig­ure which ac­tions are avail­able to whom and for which art­icle-states.

To give you an ex­ample of a com­plic­ated work­flow that’s made easy with Ed­it­Flow, here’s one that is be­ing ad­op­ted by some journ­als:

A sub­mit­ted art­icle is as­signed to a hand­ing ed­it­or, who first re­quests quick opin­ions from out­side ex­perts to gauge fit and in­terest. Then, after col­lect­ing such quick opin­ions in Ed­it­Flow, the ed­it­or makes a re­com­mend­a­tion to the chief ed­it­ors, either to re­ject the art­icle or to pro­ceed to full-blown peer re­view. If a chief ed­it­or agrees, the art­icle goes back to the care of the hand­ling ed­it­or, who sends the art­icle to ref­er­ees for full re­view re­ports. After col­lect­ing the full re­ports, the hand­ling ed­it­or makes a re­com­mend­a­tion as to wheth­er to ac­cept, re­quest a re­vi­sion of, or re­ject the art­icle.

Three lay­ers of stand­ard ed­it­or­i­al roles are avail­able (chief ed­it­or, seni­or ed­it­or, reg­u­lar ed­it­or), with their titles, vis­ib­il­ity per­mis­sions and avail­able ac­tions con­fig­ur­able. A role can be journ­al-wide or re­stric­ted to a sec­tion or spe­cial is­sue, and can be fur­ther sub­divided func­tion­ally, start­ing with the as­sign­ment of dis­tinct titles.

A view­er role is avail­able for an in­act­ive aca­dem­ic su­per­visor. A pre­ferred-ref­er­ee role is avail­able for “ed­it­ors” whose role is only to give ad­vice or re­ports on spe­cif­ic art­icles. Sev­er­al staff roles are also avail­able.

A journ­al can be sliced in­to sec­tions (for ex­ample, to sep­ar­ate areas or sub­fields, or types of art­icles), even with their own sec­tion-spe­cif­ic ed­it­ors and work­flows.

Sim­il­arly for spe­cial is­sues, which can each have their own guest ed­it­or and pro­ced­ures. As an op­tion, sub­mis­sion to a spe­cial is­sue could be al­lowed only from the in­vited au­thors that fol­low a secret URL.

Ed­it­Flow provides a dir­ect in­ter­face to a good num­ber of ag­greg­ated re­ports, col­lect­ing both raw data and com­puted stat­ist­ics. Adding to the in­ter­face a new journ­al-spe­cif­ic cus­tom re­port is as routine for our staff as adding a cus­tom email tem­plate. All re­ports are down­load­able as CSV files and thus eas­ily opened by Ex­cel.