11 May 2022
DataSalon announced today the launch of a major new module for its PaperStack service, allowing editorial staff to track rejected articles to discover if, where, and when they are later published elsewhere.
The subsequent fate of rejected submissions is often unknown to journal publishers. But a third or more are likely to end up being published elsewhere, and understanding where those rejected articles end up provides valuable insights many publishers miss out on. In particular, when some submissions end up with reputable competitor journals, might they instead have been transferred to an alternative journal within the publisher’s own portfolio?
The PaperStack system connects directly to the APIs of both ScholarOne and Editorial Manager, providing detailed and up-to-date feeds of all of a publisher’s article submissions and decisions. If the additional rejected article tracking module is also enabled, then all rejected articles are automatically searched in Crossref, identifying if they are later published elsewhere, and if so when, in which journal, and with which publisher.
The lookup process has been tested and optimized in collaboration with Crossref, and performs at a rate of around 500 lookups per minute, so even large backlogs of rejected articles can quickly be checked. The process also accounts for the fact that article titles or authors may have been amended since original submission, with each match assigned a confidence score. Lookups are re-tried every few months following rejection, as it can sometimes take a year or more for articles to appear elsewhere.
Many leading journal publishers already rely on PaperStack, and this new rejected article tracking module is now live, efficiently tracking several years’ worth of rejected articles from thousands of different journals.
Nick Andrews, Managing Director of DataSalon, commented: “We’re very proud of this major new addition to the existing PaperStack service. We know publishers often wonder if the articles they reject end up being published somewhere else, and it’s exciting to be able to provide an efficient and affordable solution to that tricky challenge.”