Online submission system provider Aries Systems Corporation, US, has announced that its Editorial Manager peer-review system was selected by the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) to successfully transition editorial workflow to the web. BBS is published by Cambridge University Press.
BBS was one of several journals pioneering a format known as Open Peer Commentary over 30 years ago. Particularly significant and controversial pieces of work are published from researchers in any area of psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology or cognitive science, together with 10-25 commentaries on each article from specialists across these disciplines, plus the author's response to them. The result is a forum for communication and discussion maintained by the careful selection of authors and commentators and refereeing of their contributions. This format anticipated the interactivity of a blog but situated it within the editorial system of an academic journal to maintain high quality.
The BBS peer commentary format posed significant challenges for updating its online submission, review and response. After exploring alternative approaches, the online submission system of Editorial Manager, with its multiple configuration options, made successful transition possible.
The Editorial Manager online submission system is used by more than 2,900 scholarly journals and processes tens of thousand of manuscripts per month. In October 2008, the independently published Dutch Journal of Medicine (Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde) selected Editorial Manager for transitioning to online peer review by customising author-facing pages to include instructions and hints in Dutch, the native language of most of the journal's contributing authors. Earlier, in September 2008, Aries Systems announced the integration of Editorial Manager with the CrossCheck plagiarism detection service. Convenient access to CrossCheck from within Editorial Manager workflows adds a powerful tool to help improve editorial integrity.
