We encourage you to fast-track all excellent papers submitted to InSITE since publishing high-quality papers helps your journal and helps the conference. Use the Fast-Tracking tab on your dashboard to invite InSITE authors to accept your offer to fast-track their submission to your journal.

Fast-tracking means that you use the reviews provided by the InSITE reviewers to pre-approve the paper for publication in your journal and tell the author that the only changes you require, if any, are those that you describe in your development letter. Or, you can write the fast-track offer to indicate that the paper will go out for review by your journal's review board as a new paper.

You will receive an email from the system with a list of externally reviewed InSITE papers, a link to the original submission, a link to the raw reviews, the number of reviews, and our thoughts of a home for this paper based on its title. On your dashboard (under Fast-Track), you also have links to download two additional documents: the revised paper and the revision document.

The list is sorted by average reviewer rating, but you know to take these average reviewer ratings with a large grain of salt. Since reviewer ratings are unreliable measures of quality, look for the reviewers’ suggestions for improvement. Reviews are of various qualities, and some reviewers rate all papers high or low. The list also shows whether at least one of the authors has already paid the conference registration fee. We publish fast-tracked papers if at least one author is a delegate to the conference. This requirement ensures that fast-tracking does not short-cut your own journal’s review process.

When you click on the selection box next to a paper, a new “Fast-Track to” comment box will appear at the bottom of the screen, like the one shown here as a screenshot. You will need to scroll down to see the newly opened box. The Notepad in that box now contains the new template with wording to get your invitation letter started. If you like the wording, you need only add what changes you require and enter the name of the journal.

The secret box at the bottom of the Fast-Track tab that appears once you check the box next to your choice can be confusing. There are many, many InSITE papers from which you can choose. Once you select one, a new box (like the one here) pops up on the bottom of the window. Just select your journal, change the REPLY BY date if you wish, then from your NOTEPAD select the T_Fasttrack Invitation template, add any conditions you wish, and click the Submit button.

While you can change the Reply Expected date, keep the date within a week. The author may hope to receive an invitation from a different one of our journals and, until the expiration date passes, no other editor can offer fast-tracking for this paper.

Figure 31. Fast-track process: select a paper to fast-track, select your journal, then fill in the comments for the author. These comments should tell the author exactly what revisions you will require for publication since, by definition, fast-tracked papers do not undergo additional review.

The system emails the author and, if the author accepts your invitation from their dashboard, the system places a copy of the paper in your journal’s queue, marked as “fast-tracked from InSITE.” It looks like this:


[AUTHOR-NAME],

Thank you for the high-quality submission PID [ARTICLE-ID] [ARTICLE-TITLE] to InSITE and for revising it the submission in light of reviewers’ suggestions.  I have reviewed your initial submission, your revision, and your revisions document.

On that basis, I am pleased to offer you the opportunity to fast-track your InSITE submission to the journal I run,  ________)

If you accept this invitation, your paper will automatically be submitted to my journal and given a new paper ID (PID).


(optional) 

While your revised paper is quite good, I do require the following revisions to make your paper suitable for publication in the journal.
(list of changes required, if any:
1.
2.
3.

select this paragraph......

  Fast-tracked papers do not undergo additional review by outside reviewers and instead are reviewed by the Accepting Editor.

OR select this paragraph ...

I would like to have the paper re-reviewed by the journal's reviewers.  By accepting fast-tracking, the paper will be automatically submitted to the journal and you will have the paper reviewed again by the journal’s International Board of Reviewers.


Follow the link in this email to accept or reject this invitation.  Note that invitation does expire.


[CURRENT-USER-NAME]

Editor-in-Chief

[CURRENT-USER-EMAIL]

The offer to fast-track, including this development wording, is saved by the system in the activity log, where you can later view it to determine whether the revised paper meets the requirements you set down in that invitation letter. If the author declines your offer to fast-track, the activity log of the original article stored the author’s decision against fast-tracking.

Understand that the fast-tracking invitation means that you have accepted the paper for publication so long as the author complies with this conditional acceptance letter. In other words, fast-tracked papers do not go out for external review unless your invitation letter specifies that it will go out for another round of reviews by the journal's review board.

To process a fast-tracked paper through the system, you will be skipping steps. If the author accepts your invitation, the paper shows up in your journal’s queue as a fast-tracked paper. You, as the Editor-in-Chief, will serve as the paper’s editor. Skip all intermediary steps from desk accept until the last step. Then “accept the paper pending revision” and use the template “T_Fast track_ invitation,” filling in the changes needed for acceptance.

If you don’t ask for any changes, just ask the author to format the paper. If you do ask for additional changes, restate those revision requirements in your T_Fast track_invitation” comments to the author and ask the author to format the paper to your journal’s specifications.

What if? It’s rare, but it does happen. If the author does not make the changes you required in your invitation letter, you can reject the paper. To do this, email the Managing Editor who will instruct the system to withdraw the paper from your queue due to author non-compliance and will note this in the author’s record. The rejection is stored in the activity log of the original article. Figure 35 shows some short wording as the description. Your development letter will be placed here.

Figure 32. A simplified example of seeing your fast-tracking offer in the submission’s Activity Log