Aries Systems Corporation

Scholarly journals continue to experience a high volume of incoming submissions every year. It is common for Editors to receive submissions that are outside the journal’s scope, but still recognize their value. In these instances, journals reject the manuscript to then transfer it to a more appropriate journal, preferably within the publisher’s portfolio to avoid losing potentially great content/research to a competitor journal/publisher. However, staff within large commercial publishers with dozens – or even hundreds – of journals are not always connected or aware of each other and their expertise. These silos and lack of visibility can make selecting the right “destination” journal difficult to determine for editorial staff. This in turn can lead to mismatched transfers or a bottleneck of pending manuscripts waiting to find the right home, clogging up the Editor’s workflow.

To help reduce this burden on editorial staff and support transfers to the most suitable sister journal, Aries Systems offers Transfer Desk – an intermediary transfer solution. Functioning as a fully separate, private Editorial Manager® (EM) site, Transfer Desk serves as a temporary “parking lot” for valuable manuscripts before they are relocated. Journals may configure a custom question in the submission workflow to allow Authors to consent to the transfer of their content and metadata in the event it is deemed necessary by the Editor. Once this permission from Authors is secured and the “Reject and Transfer” decision has been set in EM, Editors can shift the paper to Transfer Desk where it can subsequently be picked up by another Editor and reallocated to a sister journal’s EM site. Designed for publishers with ten or more journals, Transfer Desk can be accessed by designated Editors across multiple journals that would be responsible for fielding and relocating these outstanding manuscripts.

This solution not only reduces bottlenecks at the Editor Decision stage by indirectly facilitating smarter transfers, but also helps publishers maintain a competitive edge by retaining valuable research. In the event the manuscript is not fit for other journals within the publisher’s portfolio, it can still be transferred to another publisher whether they use EM or another platform, as Aries’ import/export methods comply with the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) standards as published by NISO.

For more information on adopting Transfer Desk for your Editorial Manager portfolio, contact your Aries Account Coordinator.