Engaging with editorial board members is a key element to running a successful journal. Providing initial onboarding training to new members supports their understanding of how the journal operates, provides guidance on what constitutes a productive review, and highlights the journal’s aims for future publications.
Alongside this, editors may also receive technical support around operating systems and functionality, allowing them to be more efficient. Once they have the essential tools to manage the peer review process and make decisions, many editors may later require help with ethical concerns that arise when confronting peer review misconduct in submitted or published manuscripts.
Publishers must ensure that editorial boards are equipped with the latest knowledge of industry trends and challenges so they can produce high-quality publications. Peer review and research misconduct are hot topics within the industry right now. As technology develops to further foster the dissemination of fake science, publishers and editorial teams can collaborate to create workshops and training sessions where news, trends, and best practices can be explored in safe spaces.
Workshops allow publishers to identify gaps in knowledge, perhaps focusing on specific themes and highlighting information sharing amongst the team. They also provide an opportunity to look at which policies may need updating and how workflow processes can be changed to support these policies.
Updating editors with information about how paper mills operate, for example, is critical — the number of papers published by bad actors is rapidly rising. Here are some features that can help prepare editors:
- Highlight specific characteristics within a manuscript that could be red flags
- Show how peer review and acceptance can be manipulated
- Look for ‘triggers’ that may suggest misconduct
- Observe the authorship group and assess the likelihood of their academic output
Editors may not know these factors should be considered when evaluating a manuscript. Further explanation, with examples from the content of the journal, will strengthen the editorial board’s ability to adopt rigorous practices to provide a defense and possibly prevent issues from arising later. This process can also be done in conjunction with exploring new technologies, such as integrity detection tools. These tools can help support editors’ efforts when analysing submissions. By empowering them to take advantage of new technologies, editors will be able to make assessments more quickly and provide detailed responses to authors regarding outcomes.
Although journal editors’ expertise lies within specific fields of research, most welcome learning more about the potential threats that could affect them and their publication. Publishers can take steps to support editorial boards and embed new policies and procedures to allow the journal to produce rigorous and high-quality research.
Learn More
Maverick can help with automating peer review systems to be more robust and tailored to a journal or specialty. We also develop bespoke custom dashboards that help editors and peer reviewers look for substantive issues that could alert them to a problem. We provide training to editors on research integrity issues and we offer a series of webinars on integrating researcher education into the research life cycle. For more information, contact your Maverick representative or info@maverick-os.com.
By Emilie McDermott, Affiliate Senior Associate
Emilie McDermott provides editorial management solutions to publishers, editors and journal owners. She has a broad range of expertise within academic publishing and has managed book projects as well as academic journals. She has a wealth of knowledge around research integrity, advising customers about ethical misconduct and best practices. Acting as a Senior Content Editor within an editorial team, she has expertise in managing editorial boards, peer review management and is familiar with systems such as ScholarOne and Editorial Manager. She has worked at Clarivate as an editor at Web of Science, conducting evaluations and providing feedback and guidance on journals around best practices and offering editorial recommendations for publishers.
Further Reading
Peer Review: tools, training, and integration
Maverick Peer Review Support service sheet
Peer review from a researcher’s perspective
The role of AI in research integrity
A researcher’s perspective on research integrity