A good friend of mine was befuddled by the manuscript submittal process for an academic paper. This paper was a culmination of a life’s work in reading and dyslexia, and the manuscript had gone through the process of being a dissertation, a co-authored work, and now finally a revised paper that would optimally fit the standards of the international magazine. She kept getting email reminders that her submission was incomplete and that she needed to submit the work. She had me go into the system to see how to work it, and in short order, it was sent and under consideration.

Processing Manuscripts

Various publishers have gone to using socio-technical sites for the management of manuscripts and submittals—for articles and chapters. There are many back-end assumptions of how systems should work and the workflow processes. Writers submit their works in pieces—the chapter, the imagery, the letters to the editor, the cover page, and so on. They finalize their submission and send it on into the process.

The process usually involves logging the manuscript, sending it to various reviewers both within and outside the system, collecting the feedback, notifying the author(s), collecting revisions, and then proceeding with a final editorial decision—either processing the manuscript for publication or rejecting it on any number of grounds. If it is processed, then there’s plenty of work to check the originality of the manuscript and the correctness of the citations. The files are checked for fit to the various technology systems.

Fit to the Technological Structure

My experience with this most recent technological system for publishing was dismal. There was a lack of clear directions about the process. To actually get the mss. put together and submitted, one had to go to a long drop-down menu (with some unnecessary steps) that appeared if one hovered over a link. It was very non-intuitive. And this was for a scientific publication with a big-name publisher.

I understood why the uploading of the files themselves was insufficient. The idea is that authors may upload contents and then revise until just before the deadline, at which point, they would put it all together and submit it.

These systems have been created to speed up the process of peer revision, editing, and taking works to press. However, these can be very unwieldy if not designed properly. One example of that awkwardness was that there was no “form” for a letter. To get that submitted to the editors, my friend had to mislabel the item to get it into the system (it went in as a “table”). Sometimes, one has to work outside the formulaic strictures of technologies to deliver the necessary contents. I have personally experienced dropped messages from editors who assert that they’d sent something but realized that they had misunderstood the system functionalities and sent follow-up emails outside the system instead.

Lost Work?

Such technologies can be a real boon to the publishing field, but the technologies have to be built in a way to accommodate non-technological individuals. I worry that the process may swamp individuals and lose the value of their work—even when it’s a product of a lifetime’s effort, research, collaboration, and reflection.