On the agenda for boards and meetings

Well, it has been a long couple of weeks, what with the ScholarOne conference and the Editorial Manager conference and with Highwire visiting the office, also London Online was a knockout as usual. It is also board meeting season with many of the journals boards and editors meeting up and talking strategy and impact factors, and joining in the festivities of food and drink.
Speaking of food and drink, does there seem to be more parties this year than most? There seems to be about 4 this year, that’s it I’m never drinking again.
Speaking of board meetings and editor meetings, I would like to hear what other journals and publishers do regarding them and what their agendas consist of, because I have been to tonnes of them and really think we can make them so much more productive by changing the content of the meetings. I think I would like to talk to my editors more about the policies and ethics of the articles and speak to them about what COPE and the EQUATOR Network can do for them. Also I would like to get them to take a look at WAME and find out a bit more about the nitty gritty. Maybe have a small ethics workshop at the meeting to give them a taste of real cases. I often find information gets to the Editor in Chief but how that is filtered down to the associates is a mystery; my guess is sometimes it doesn’t. Also good practice in an editorial office needs to be shouted a little louder - who does what and when and why - editors do some things that editorial assistants should do and vice versa. Help me out here.

User Conference ScholarOne

The Manuscript Central European User Conference 2008 was held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Regent's Park, London. It went down very well this year, it also helped that it was a 20 minute walk from my flat.
I always feel very welcome at these conferences, I think these people are very friendly and enjoy their work, they seem to have a passion for what they do and engage their audience well.

This year they focused on many aspects of their products; abstract central, ScholarOne platform, web services, file storage, and much more.
Earlier in the year they conducted an editor survey which was interesting, as you usually hear of author surveys or reviewer surveys but not editor surveys, there way of thinking was that because their system already works well for authors and reviewers it was time to find out what those editors were moaning about (sorry eds). Editors were given tasks to do on Manuscript Central and then interviewed afterwards, some of the tasks were searching for reviewers, inviting reviewers and basic navigation around old history metadata. It was felt a lot was learnt with this and the data will be used for future releases.

The afternoon (after a nice lunch) broke into two sections. 1 hints and tips, 2 publisher and society session, I went to the publisher session to learn more about moving from one system to another and data migration, also how repositories are being dealt with and password encryption.

ScholarOne are really moving forward with their features they are now on version 4.1.1 or something like that I can never keep up.

One of the winners with me is their help centre, it is excellent, they have video tutorials, they have audio, they have webex, they even have Manuscript Central University where you go on an intense 3 day course, it is highly recommended and you can get a certificate (OO-ooo).

The day was ended with a reception with drinks, nibbles and drinks, oh and drinks.

Well done ScholarOne.