At this point, the editor takes over the review process, and you monitor all your papers. (The system will email you a progress report and exception reports if there are problems, all of which you can see from your dashboard at http://My.InformingScience.org.)

When the reviews have been submitted, the editor makes a recommendation to you regarding acceptance and prepares for you a draft Decision Letter to send to the author that includes a ‘Development Letter’ within it. The decision letter consists of boilerplate wording from the templates plus wording specific for this paper. The boilerplate templates provide best practices wording for rejecting, accepting pending revision and formatting, or (once a paper has been reviewed and formatted as camera-ready) accepting it for publication.

When the editor makes this recommendation (rejects, accepts the paper subject to revision, or accepts a paper for publication), the system emails you for you to review this recommendation and the wording the editor inserted. At this point, the system has NOT contacted the author.

At this point, you decide. You review the editor’s recommendation and decision letter and either approve the letter as editor composed it, or you modify the decision and/or letter as part of your mentoring of editors. The decisions and letters that your editors write require a review by you as the EiC or one of your A/EiCs. Only then does the system notify the author. Keep in mind that, since the system will not notify the author until you act, the system continues to send reminders to the editor and the EiC or A/EiC until you act on the editor’s recommendation.

It is extremely important that as EiC or A/EiC, you review the decision letters that Editors write to verify that they use the Best Practices templates and paste (or insert a link) mentoring development suggestions. The Informing Science Institute requires this quality assurance step to ensure that all our communications with authors are written in a form and format to help them become better at their profession. (See target dates for reviewers and the editor.)

Do not accept a paper as final until the paper is in a camera-ready format (or close to it). It needs to include all author information (bios and photos). You and your editor should read each sentence of papers accepted for publication to verify that it is up to the quality we all expect.


For Your Information. Before you even see the paper, a lot occurs behind the scenes. That is, before the author can submit the paper, the system requires a few things to happen.

First, the corresponding author needs to have an account. Then the author fills in information about the paper, including its abstract, and uploads the file.

Second, the corresponding author needs also to indicate any co-authors. All co-authors need to have or to obtain an Informing Science Institute account at http://Join.InformingScience.org. If a co-author is not already in the system when the paper is submitted, the system creates a free ISI colleague account for that person and requires verification from the co-author that the email address is correct, the individual is a co-author, and has not and will not submit the paper to another outlet. This is necessary for two reasons: (i) we need co-authors to understand that the paper is under review so that they do not submit the paper to a different outlet; and (ii) occasionally, a new researcher will add others as co-authors those who do not accept co-authorship. The corresponding author can complete the submission of the paper only after all co-authors agree to it. The system handles all these details.

Third, the corresponding author selects topics by which the system can match reviewers to the paper’s topics.

The last step is to complete submission by the author agreeing to the terms for submission

The following sections describe each of these steps is in detail.