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At the same time Elsevier is determined to continue publishing content in ever-increasing richer functionality for its user community. Journals and their content have to be positioned closer to the day-to-day work processes of the researcher, both at the submission stage as well as when being used by readers. We are committed to making the necessary investments to foster these fundamental interests of scientists.
How is Elsevier able to translate its overall strategy to its many individual journals?
Elsevier’s structure enables each publishing team in a specialized market to take general concepts and overall developments, and apply these to the specific journals. We systematically apply a process of confronting market-specific needs and trends with the overall publishing developments. From that process the best strategy for the individual journals is established and modified on a periodic basis. Editors play a key role here, as they are the spokespeople for their research communities and make us aware of the specific needs of these communities.
Why is there so much emphasis on quality improvement in Elsevier’s strategy, and what exactly do you mean by “quality”?
Let me start with answering the second question: it’s hard to give a definition for that. Quality is in the eye of the reader – the user’s perception of the journal. On a quantitative scale numbers of citations and usage are measures of quality, but all of these have their limitations. There are, of course, other ways of defining quality, and we encourage our editors to determine what quality means to their community. We believe that quality attracts quality, but also that publishing low quality ultimately affects the existence of the journal. We believe that the continuation of journals is fundamentally important for the communities in which they exist.
Elsevier publishes a very large number of titles. How do individual journals benefit from Elsevier’s size?
There are three elements:
(a) Elsevier is using its resources to invest in major innovations, such as ScienceDirect, EES and Scopus, which can all positively affect the publishing process.
(b) By sharing knowledge and best practices. Positive publishing developments in one area can easily be transferred to other areas.
(c) Distribution network: we have far larger journal circulations than most other publishers. This benefits many smaller and medium-sized journals by exposing them to a wider readership and raising their profile with the audience.
What are the three biggest priorities for journal publishing?
Our biggest priority is improving the quality of individual journals. Our second priority is improving customer satisfaction, particularly that of editors, authors and reviewers. The third priority is finding the balance between introducing innovations in the publishing process without negatively affecting the critical path of traditional scholarly publishing we have followed up to now.
Can you mention some examples of service improvements Elsevier is rolling out?
We recently integrated EES with Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and citation database. There are direct links from EES to Scopus, which enable an editor or reviewer to search for the author of the submitted paper, or to check whether a paper with a similar title already exists. Later this year, the submitted articles’ references will be linked to the record of that article in Scopus/ ScienceDirect. This will make it much easier for editors or reviewers to check references, as they no longer have to log in and out of two platforms, but will be able to navigate seamlessly from EES to Scopus/ScienceDirect. The integration of these tools is helping editors and reviewers work more efficiently.
Another tool we recently introduced to support editors and reviewers, is technical screening. Feedback from reviewers indicates they are too frequently asked to review manuscripts of an insufficient quality from a purely technical viewpoint. This clearly frustrates them. We have started to take more active measures to ensure that manuscripts sent out for peer review adhere to a set of minimum technical standards. Manuscripts that do not meet the agreed set of minimum technical standards are returned to the submitting author with a checklist of missing or insufficient items. The author may resubmit after attending to these technical insufficiencies. Technical screening not only provides useful feedback to authors, but it is also substantially reducing the number of technically sub-standard papers reviewers receive.
We currently see a lot of innovative Web. 2.0 developments. Do you feel Elsevier is participating enough and can you give some examples?
The publishing process has always been about dissemination and communication around scientific discoveries. New Web 2.0 developments which target these fundamental needs get full support from Elsevier as most developments foster meaningful communications around scientific discoveries and link them closely to the formal publication record, the article. As our overall goal is to create a richer publishing environment we target those developments which clearly contribute to that.
We do this already with, for example, the Scirus Topic Pages which were recently beta launched. Scirus Topic Pages is a free, wiki-like service for the scientific community, where experts summarize specific scientific topics, and where daily updated links to the latest, most relevant journal literature and Web sources are presented on one page. We see the Scirus Topic Pages as an experimental platform where we give our authors novel ways to communicate and collaborate. From initial testing we know that the Scirus Topic Pages will be highly ranked in search engines, enabling us to give our authors more exposure. In the next couple of months or so we will communicate this more extensively to our journal editors, and engage them in the further development of this service.
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