J&J Editorial is a peer review management company helping innumerable scholarly journals to meet the demands of the publication process: their services include editorial, production, copyediting and systems support. During my last semester (Spring 2016) as a Masters student, I got an opportunity to intern as an Editorial Assistant to the Future Science Group (FSG) team at J&J. FSG is a science and medical academic publisher based out of the United Kingdom. Founded in 2001, they currently publish 31 journals under two imprints, Future Medicine and Future Science. All of their journals are peer reviewed through a double blind system, meaning the author(s) and reviewer(s) are both kept anonymous throughout the peer review process. J&J Editorial handles the peer review for all of their journals, including Future Oncology, Bioanalysis, and Immunotherapy.
My work as an intern at the department has meant a lot in terms of discovering several new facets of the publishing process in relation to articles in journals. The processes, although same in their basic requirements across this industry and academic publishing of books, stand significantly apart in their application here. As a peer-review researcher, I have been able to explore varied ways by which reviewers are found. The company follows a double-blind system of reviewing where not only the reviewer and author(s) do not know each other, should not have published anything together beyond ten years, but also they cannot belong to the same institution. At the time of selection, a potential reviewer when found, cannot even be reviewing other articles from other FSG journals. Potential reviewer-names found through recommendations from the authors, and the Web of Science, apart from Scopus are put through sort/search engines such as Scopus itself and Pub Med in order to finalize on the ones who are to be sent invites to. The search draws from keywords specific to the article to be published. Although this exercise seems mechanical, there is much to be sorted through and thought out before one can make a decision on a reviewer. For instance, although there is a set number of publications that a potential reviewer must have in order to be chosen, there might be areas of research that are recent and therefore there are fewer scholars who have publications in that area and that too only in the last few years. Hence, as an editorial assistant, I have to be aware of the fact that from article to article, research area to research area, the bases for search will have to change. I have also realized that the process of searching and finding reviewers is a exhaustive and time-consuming one - it can be even more tedious when keywords very specific to the article/research area do not come up with the required number of hits. For then one has to go through the titles of the articles even if they do not include the keywords, and that exercise can be beneficial for zeroing in on the reviewers.
In a non-academic setting, these methods of searching for sources draw a lot from the ways one employs at an academic research setting. Hence, the transition from the University to the workplace did not seem that big of a leap for me. Here, I encountered challenges similar to the ones one faces when trying to find secondary sources for a topic of interest or research question. However, there are differences in terms of the filters one has to put in place to search for reviewers, or the search engines one goes through in order to achieve that.
Apart from the search for reviewers, as an intern, every week I have been shadowing members of various teams representative of journals/societies/publishers like PLOS One, Wiley, INFORMA, Elsevier among others who are involved in the processes of communicating with authors, associate editors and chief editors for particular journals/societies; in production and proofreading (at various stages of an article's life) according to guidelines laid down by a certain publisher; and in copyediting articles for format and style. This has given me a fair idea of how the company works for several institutions it holds the responsibility of handling editorial processes for.
My experience with J&J has allowed me access to the workings of an organization that has developed effective ways to deal with a huge amount of editorial processes that makes the publication of journal articles smoother and allows for the dissemination of knowledge they gather through research in a timely and orderly fashion. Work here has also helped me to understand the differences in the way publication is handled for journal articles as opposed to how it was handled in the publishing house I worked for as an editor for books. In the latter, the systems and protocols were vastly different; communication, the process of selecting reviewers, etc. - all of it was personalized. Moreover, as editors, we would be handling 8 to 10 projects at a time - the numbers consisting of monographs, edited volumes, editions, among others. Responsibilities included not only editing copy and content, sending queries to authors, but developing a cast-off and costing with the help of the production department, working on jacket design and layout inside the book with designers and typesetters, and even after a book was out, working with marketing professionals to help develop marketing material for the book. Sometimes, work included not only working on books that I was directly handling, but collaborating with other editors on larger projects, supervising younger editors and training them into the editorial processes, aiding other editors to locate images/artists for book covers and also helping them ideate over cover designs, among others. As said before, work at J&J has been a different experience altogether. I have come to realize that personalization of communication is impossible when dealing with the sheer number of article submissions per day! I have understood that editorial and production processes have to be separated and distributed among many in order for that number to be dealt with; for one editor to don as many hats as I used to in a publishing house is impractical here. Technological determinism is at its best in J&J and for good reason.
As an editorial assistant intern, J&J has allowed me an experience that will stand me in good stead in the years to come! As an Editor, I have been introduced to a workspace culture that puts cognitive communication through efficient technologies (Smart) to good use, where the workflow processes are constantly evolving and changing and do not stick to models from yester-years (there are no files with a sex life here, much to the contentment of Lee Clark Johns). The writing - be it in relation to communication or texts to be copyedited - is completely "results-oriented" but draws from certain methods and protocols pertaining to the Journal one is dealing with. Ideas - if they are workable and efficient even though they are new - are heard and encouraged in this workspace.
The twelve weeks in J&J have allowed me to not only develop myself as an editor, and a peer-review manager, but it has also allowed me to understand how to manage content-flow efficiently. It has been a pleasure to work with you, Brit, and all the others that I shadowed! Thank you for your support, trust and generous amounts of encouragement.
My work as an intern at the department has meant a lot in terms of discovering several new facets of the publishing process in relation to articles in journals. The processes, although same in their basic requirements across this industry and academic publishing of books, stand significantly apart in their application here. As a peer-review researcher, I have been able to explore varied ways by which reviewers are found. The company follows a double-blind system of reviewing where not only the reviewer and author(s) do not know each other, should not have published anything together beyond ten years, but also they cannot belong to the same institution. At the time of selection, a potential reviewer when found, cannot even be reviewing other articles from other FSG journals. Potential reviewer-names found through recommendations from the authors, and the Web of Science, apart from Scopus are put through sort/search engines such as Scopus itself and Pub Med in order to finalize on the ones who are to be sent invites to. The search draws from keywords specific to the article to be published. Although this exercise seems mechanical, there is much to be sorted through and thought out before one can make a decision on a reviewer. For instance, although there is a set number of publications that a potential reviewer must have in order to be chosen, there might be areas of research that are recent and therefore there are fewer scholars who have publications in that area and that too only in the last few years. Hence, as an editorial assistant, I have to be aware of the fact that from article to article, research area to research area, the bases for search will have to change. I have also realized that the process of searching and finding reviewers is a exhaustive and time-consuming one - it can be even more tedious when keywords very specific to the article/research area do not come up with the required number of hits. For then one has to go through the titles of the articles even if they do not include the keywords, and that exercise can be beneficial for zeroing in on the reviewers.
In a non-academic setting, these methods of searching for sources draw a lot from the ways one employs at an academic research setting. Hence, the transition from the University to the workplace did not seem that big of a leap for me. Here, I encountered challenges similar to the ones one faces when trying to find secondary sources for a topic of interest or research question. However, there are differences in terms of the filters one has to put in place to search for reviewers, or the search engines one goes through in order to achieve that.
Apart from the search for reviewers, as an intern, every week I have been shadowing members of various teams representative of journals/societies/publishers like PLOS One, Wiley, INFORMA, Elsevier among others who are involved in the processes of communicating with authors, associate editors and chief editors for particular journals/societies; in production and proofreading (at various stages of an article's life) according to guidelines laid down by a certain publisher; and in copyediting articles for format and style. This has given me a fair idea of how the company works for several institutions it holds the responsibility of handling editorial processes for.
My experience with J&J has allowed me access to the workings of an organization that has developed effective ways to deal with a huge amount of editorial processes that makes the publication of journal articles smoother and allows for the dissemination of knowledge they gather through research in a timely and orderly fashion. Work here has also helped me to understand the differences in the way publication is handled for journal articles as opposed to how it was handled in the publishing house I worked for as an editor for books. In the latter, the systems and protocols were vastly different; communication, the process of selecting reviewers, etc. - all of it was personalized. Moreover, as editors, we would be handling 8 to 10 projects at a time - the numbers consisting of monographs, edited volumes, editions, among others. Responsibilities included not only editing copy and content, sending queries to authors, but developing a cast-off and costing with the help of the production department, working on jacket design and layout inside the book with designers and typesetters, and even after a book was out, working with marketing professionals to help develop marketing material for the book. Sometimes, work included not only working on books that I was directly handling, but collaborating with other editors on larger projects, supervising younger editors and training them into the editorial processes, aiding other editors to locate images/artists for book covers and also helping them ideate over cover designs, among others. As said before, work at J&J has been a different experience altogether. I have come to realize that personalization of communication is impossible when dealing with the sheer number of article submissions per day! I have understood that editorial and production processes have to be separated and distributed among many in order for that number to be dealt with; for one editor to don as many hats as I used to in a publishing house is impractical here. Technological determinism is at its best in J&J and for good reason.
As an editorial assistant intern, J&J has allowed me an experience that will stand me in good stead in the years to come! As an Editor, I have been introduced to a workspace culture that puts cognitive communication through efficient technologies (Smart) to good use, where the workflow processes are constantly evolving and changing and do not stick to models from yester-years (there are no files with a sex life here, much to the contentment of Lee Clark Johns). The writing - be it in relation to communication or texts to be copyedited - is completely "results-oriented" but draws from certain methods and protocols pertaining to the Journal one is dealing with. Ideas - if they are workable and efficient even though they are new - are heard and encouraged in this workspace.
The twelve weeks in J&J have allowed me to not only develop myself as an editor, and a peer-review manager, but it has also allowed me to understand how to manage content-flow efficiently. It has been a pleasure to work with you, Brit, and all the others that I shadowed! Thank you for your support, trust and generous amounts of encouragement.