Editorial Service set to accelerate

There has been tremendous progress made in the development of Elsevier’s Electronic Services (EES) in the last 12 months, a progress that will continue as further enhancements are implemented.

Results so far
Martin Tanke, Managing Director of Elsevier Life Sciences reports, “During 2004, we rolled out EES for close to almost 500 journals. The result is that nearly 50% of manuscripts are submitted electronically now. Although we had actually planned to progress a little faster, we are extremely happy with the results to date and will soon accelerate the roll out so that 90% of all journals will be using EES within the next 2 years.”

The results Tanke is referring to are a 21% increase in submissions, a 12% (average) decrease in referee time and almost a full elimination of postage costs. An equally important result that where Elsevier has asked, Editors have indicated that EES meets and exceeds the expectations: they would recommend EES to other Editors.

Human touch
A major advantage that an online editorial handling system like EES has is that administrative support can be provided online. Editors have repeatedly told Elsevier how pushed for time they are and that administrative support is needed. While EES diminishes a lot of Editors’ administrative work, it is not completely automatic. Elsevier has therefore installed a dedicated team to supply additional real time support for Editors. Tanke explains, “This online help, provided by Elsevier staff, will save Editors time. Think of possibilities in checking article completeness, or taking care of those time-consuming transmittal forms.” Elsevier has tested this new approach and Editors are reacting positively. From February next year Elsevier will further fine tune this service.

Problem solving
When asked about performance issues, Tanke replies, “The system has many parameters, including the computer, the user, the network, the internet connection, and the way we host the program. There have been performance issues due to, for example, the way the program runs on our computers and the interaction with the email system, as well as a variety of other issues. In fixing these problems, we applied a 90-day development freeze while we turned everything upside down to ‘find the leaks’. Luckily,” he says, “this has resulted in an improved knowledge of the entire configuration and an ensuing stable period of over 3 months, with no disruptions.”

Coming soon
Several new releases of the EES application are planned in 2005 with many new features. Progressively better performance is expected from the system, as it becomes more robust. This includes a full recovery system, so that in the event of power outages or other calamities, only a few minutes downtime will be experienced. One of the most exciting functions editors will discover in upcoming releases is the conference tool, facilitating a more efficient handling of conference papers, posters and proceedings.

“We are determined to make EES an integrated part of an editor’s workflow by listening to the needs of users, tailoring the system to suit them and connecting EES to other tools such as Scopus,” says Tanke.

There has been a great variety of requests from editors for various functions: in fact, there are as many requests for change as there are ways of working. A group of publishers and technologists review all requests and determine the priorities for future releases. However, if you are the only editor who has requested a certain feature, there is a chance you will have to wait a while for it.

Change process
As with any change process, users can experience some teething troubles. “This is only the first phase – trying to get everyone on-line,” Tanke says. “In the next phase it will become possible to do things that were not possible before. Fast forward five years from now and the majority of editors will be amazed that once we relied on paper and snail mail.”

Please send responses to this article to editorsupdate@elsevier.com

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New features
An overview of current EES functions is presented here. Numerous additional features, many of them requested by editors, will be incorporated this year (2005). These future functions include:

Inviting Reviewers
A choice of invitation letters allows Editors to use different standard letters for different types of invitations, for instance to distinguish between a Board Member and an "outside" reviewer, or between a first review and a review of a revised version.

*Add 'Draft' and 'Save' features to the Notify Author feature. The 'Draft' and 'Save' options for the Notify Author feature allows the Editor to save a letter in case of an interruption. Also, it allows e.g. an Editor-in-Chief to approve the letter entered by an Editorial Assistant before it is sent out. This eliminates the need to immediately finish and send a decision letter once it is customized.

*Ad hoc communications.

Ad hoc communications allows the Editor to send an e-mail message from within EES that is captured in the history of the manuscript. This eliminates the need to send email outside EES and keeps a complete record of all sent (not received) messages regarding a manuscript.

*Log-in options.

With the new Login options, users will have the possibility to set a default role so they can simply hit "return" after entering their username and password, rather than clicking their role.

*MS number on PDF.

The manuscript number will be visible on the PDF of the manuscript for easier identification.