Morressier at the SSP 2o24 meeting

The SSP meeting is an annual highlight for the scholarly communications community and we learned a great deal through the many conversations we had with stakeholders across the industry, and through a varied program of sessions. Here are some highlights. 

Introducing Journal Manager

This year, we introduced the community to our work on the next-generation journal submission and peer-review platform: Journal Manager. We were so excited to talk about why we’re entering the journal space, how we’re approaching this task, and what KPIs we’re relentlessly driven by. These include:

• Completion rate: How many authors successfully submit a manuscript?
• Time to submit: How easily can authors submit?
• Author satisfaction and retention: How good was the author's experience and how many authors return?
  
  
  

Industry breakout session

Our industry breakout session entitled The Future of Journals, led by CEO and co-founder Sami Benchekroun, introduced our new submission system with a focus on current challenges and solutions that will carry the industry into the future. There was particular interest in what we’re aiming to achieve for Journal Manager’s key stakeholders:

For publishers, we’re looking to slash the time it takes to bring a journal to market. The flexibility this brings is essential for smaller and mid-sized publishers to be able to compete in a rapidly-shifting landscape, and we’re aiming for a journal launch time of under 5 days and a transfer acceptance rate of 40%. This is a 10x improvement on current industry standards.

For editors, we’re looking for a 33% increase in efficiency, reducing their average manuscript touch time to under an hour and increasing reviewer acceptance rates by 25%. This frees up their time to deal with more problematic submissions, maintaining rigorous quality standards in the scientific record.

For authors, we’re aiming for average submission times of under 15 minutes, which is 3x faster than current benchmarks. The author experience has to be out-of-this-world and we’re looking for net promoter scores of above +50.

Design Partner Program

We got a ton of interest from publishers wanting to know more about our Design Partner program for Journal Manager. The program provides members with insights and data about the status of their current workflows, helping them to identify bottlenecks, vulnerabilities, and areas for improvement. It also provides them with early access to Journal Manager, a migration kit and roll out support, as well as input on the product’s development roadmap.

Integrity integrity integrity

Research integrity continues to be top-of-mind for industry leaders. In response, there’s a burgeoning market of technology solutions designed to help editorial teams to root out low-integrity content, from paper-mill detection to author verification. Many of these were present at SSP and it was no surprise that our team got a lot of inquiries about Integrity Manager, which seamlessly integrates leading fraud solutions to provide actionable intelligence in a single, easy-to-use platform.

A note on bad actors

Our apologies to Keanu Reeves, whom Sami referenced during the introduction to the keynote by Deborah Blum, in which he discussed the bad actors behind the integrity crisis in publishing. Contrite, Benchekroun says, “I’m a huge Keanu fan. I can’t believe he appears on the IMDb list of bad actors – he just shouldn’t be there. For what it’s worth, I’m sure he’d be an excellent steward of the scientific record, defending it to the last with all he’s got, just like John Wick or Neo from the Matrix.”

Register for our webinar to learn more about Journal Manager