MECA – A New Project to Facilitate Manuscript Exchange across Systems

This presentation by Sally Ubnoske was part of a NISO 2019 virtual conference entitled From Submisstion to Publication. Ubnoske offered this as the abstract of her talk, "It has been reported that Authors lose time and effort when their manuscript is rejected and they have to repeat the submission process in subsequent journals. In addition, it is estimated that 15 million hours of researcher time is wasted each year repeating reviews. Both of these challenges could be addressed if journals and publishers could seamlessly transfer manuscripts between publications using different submission and peer review tracking systems. With the growth of cascading workflows, manuscripts are regularly transferred within a publishing group. But a growing challenge is to transfer the manuscript (and, optionally, peer review data) across publishers and manuscript systems and even to and from preprint servers.

The NISO MECA Working Group was formed to develop a common approach for the transfer of manuscripts between and among manuscript systems, such as those in use at publishers and preprint servers. The group is comprised of producers and users of manuscript systems, including production vendors, publishers, preprint servers and author service vendors. The group is currently finalizing a NISO Recommended Practice."

 

Click on the arrow above to watch the embedded video or click through here to view the recorded presentation on Youtube.