Why is the author experience so important? 

In an increasingly competitive and rapidly changing publishing landscape, Wiley is committed to prioritizing researchers’ needs and solving existing pain points. The path to a published article can be confusing and time-consuming, especially for Early Career Researchers (ECRs). Many aspects of the author journey have yet to evolve with the advent of emerging technology and changing standards.

Wiley is actively developing solutions to the problems that researchers are facing when trying to publish their work. We are currently focusing on a user-centric discovery model incorporating market research, one-on-one author interviews, and ECR workshops. Our goal is to launch inventive new platforms that will make it easier for researchers to identify journals, write and submit their papers, showcase their research outputs beyond just published manuscripts, and shorten the time to publication. 

Below we share two innovative and exciting projects in development.

Wiley Authors Submission

One of Wiley’s major initiatives aimed at improving the author experience is the development of a centralized gateway to relieve common pain points in the existing submission process. Wiley Authors’ submission gateway is designed to automatically extract and populate article metadata from the author’s manuscript and provide a cleaner, more modern user interface. This new submission gateway will remove tedious data entry and reduce the time it takes an author to submit their manuscript, freeing researchers to spend more time working on the things that matter most to them—their research.

Once submitted, manuscripts will be automatically sent to the journal’s Electronic Editorial Office (beginning with ScholarOne Manuscripts) for peer review and other editorial tasks, allowing editorial workflows to remain unchanged while providing a significantly improved author experience. Another advantage of this new submission gateway is that it forms the foundation on which additional capabilities will be added in the future, including screening tools to provide authors with feedback about the quality and suitability of their manuscript to a chosen journal, and support for a “1-click” resubmission offer to another journal if their manuscript is rejected.

Wiley will pilot the submission gateway with the Journal of Neuroscience Research in October 2019. The official launch in January 2020 will include approximately 15 additional titles. More journals will be integrated as new features are developed throughout 2020 and beyond.

Authorea “Under Review” Pilot 

Authorea’s adoption into the Atypon and Wiley ecosystems (learn more here) expands Wiley’s opportunities to support open research initiatives and enables researchers to disseminate their research outputs quicker. We are excited to share the launch of our first scaled pilot of Wiley journals onto Authorea with the “Under Review” feature. 

Starting October 2019, Wiley journals will begin to integrate with Authorea, offering authors the option to deposit their manuscripts as preprints on initial submission. If the option is selected, Authorea will then automatically create the preprint, stamp it with a CrossRef DOI (adding it to the official scholarly record), and proceed to track and record an article’s progress through peer review. In the case that an article is ultimately rejected, the preprint will remain on Authorea but be disassociated from the journal. Our aim is to accelerate the adoption of preprinting and increase transparency by presenting information about peer review in real time in a way that is meaningful to the research community.

Over time, Wiley will continue scaling Authorea to make use of its more advanced features such as data hosting and embedded rich media, as well as eventual integration with the Wiley Authors submission gateway to provide a seamless modern experience for authors through the entire pre-publication and publication process.

Authors are the heart of Wiley’s business, and we’re listening and responding with new tools and resources to help ensure a smooth pathway to publishing their research. Follow our path to rollout on Twitter via @wileyinresearch and @wileyopen and right here on The Wiley Network.