Members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the 'Manuscript Exchange Common Approach' (MECA) - a major new academic publishing initiative co-led by HighWire Founding Director John Sack. The project will see the industry's leading technology providers work together on a more standardised approach to the transfer of manuscripts between and among manuscript systems, such as those in use at publishers and preprint servers.
The outdated, time-intensive way authors currently submit and re-submit manuscripts to different publishers is quietly a major productivity killer for researchers globally. It is estimated that a staggering 15 million hours of researcher time is consumed each year, simply repeating reviews. But the problem, described by one expert as 'publishing's nasty secret', could be solved if journals and publishers were able to transfer manuscripts between publications using different submission-tracking systems.
The MECA project will work towards a number of key goals, in order to address issues such as: Vocabulary: providing a standard nomenclature; Packaging: a simple, flexible, standard way to assemble files; Tagging: being able to pass submission information from system to system;
Peer review: being able to pass review information from system to system; Transfer: enabling the transfer of information from system to system; Identity: a unique, consistent identity across systems; and Transmission: a simple, consistent way to send the information across systems.
Momentum has gathered pace since the project was first presented by John at the 2017 SSP Annual Meeting, with the first use case for the project now live.
In addition to HighWire and eJP, MECA's leading participants are Aries, Clarivate, and PLOS. The collaboration between HighWire and eJournalPress enables MECA for a new life sciences journal so that manuscripts and reviews could flow to - and from - other journals in a standardised way. The implementation entered into production earlier this year, and is now completed - meaning that manuscripts and reviews now flow smoothly via MECA, with the only author intervention being to agree to the transfer.
This first, fully-operational implementation will now serve as the base for documentation and elaboration through the NISO review and approval process.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
