EMS Editorial System for Journals - Instructions for Editors

Editing articles

Clicking on the submission number in the list of articles will open the entry's page.

  1. In the upper part of the page you will see all the information requested from and entered by the corresponding author of the article. All the entries can be edited, but that will seldom be necessary.
  2. Authors are offered the possibility to provide, at the time of the online submission, a link to a preliminary version of their article. If and when the article is eventually accepted, it will be listed on the publicly available section "Forthcoming" on every journal's homepage which uses the system (see Journal of Spectral Theory for an instance of the feature). There, the articles are in alphabetical order with respect to the first authors which makes them easy to find for any user. The information displayed is exactly as it is stored in the system. Of course it could be edited in principle, but It is clear that this is preliminary information, as given by the author himself. If the author has provided a link, it is given under the header "preview", otherwise a search in arXiv is offered with the names of the authors and the title of the article.
  3. The target issue and volume will remain empty for most of the journals and are only useful for those who process entire issues in batches. In those (rare) cases, these fields help to compose the entire issue. In most cases, articles will be processed according to their entry. The composition of the issues may be changed if an Editor-in-Chief has a reason or wish to do so, by direct communication with the EMS.
  4. View all files that have been uploaded into this submission, either by an editor, the author, or a referee; any file can be deleted with the [Del] button next to it
  5. File manipulation: The editor can upload any file himself, selecting a file from the local computer using the [Browse] button in the "Add File" section and confirming the choice by pressing the [Save] button.
    The additional "Request"-buttons (present only if status is "review") create mails to the author or a referee (enter referee's email first) that request the upload of a specific file. The mail opens in the editor's mail client where it can be edited and sent; initially it contains the salutation, a text specific to the request, and the upload link; mail to a referee also contains a download link for the current fulltext.pdf
  6. There are fields for the date of submission, date of revision and date of acceptance. Not every journal will use all of them in the article itself, but it seems useful to have them. The system will tentatively enter the date of the electronic submission by the author as the date of submission, and enter the date when an article's status was set to "accepted" into the corresponding field. The only date that needs to be entered by the editor in charge is the date of revision, if available at all. All of the fields can of course be edited if need be. Which dates to display in the final version of the article is up to each journal, and a matter of agreement between the Editor-in-Chief and the publisher.

  7. The "status" of an article describes the state of the evaluation process. Not all of the statuses are visible to all users, but the most important are, namely "submitted", "review", "rejected" and "accepted".

    After submission by the author, the initial status is "submitted", meaning that the author has completed the necessary procedure, including upload of a pdf file. The editor in charge receives an automatic email that the author has chosen him as editor in charge of his paper. This choice can be overriden by mutual consent between the Editor-in-Chief and the involved editors, but such an agreement is best discussed beforehand and by direct email communication between the parties outside the scope of this system.

    If a submission stays in the original status (submitted) for more than two weeks, the system reminds the editor in charge of it regularly by automatic email. The purpose of this notification email is to make reasonably sure that an article does not go unnoticed. Nothing else will happen, and when the editor in charge puts the status to "review", notification emails will stop.

    In the default configuration, only the Editor(s)-in-Chief can set the status of a paper to "accepted". In such a set-up, when an editor thinks that a paper should be accepted, he should write so to the Editor-in-Chief who will make the final decision and set the status. This ensures that the Editor-in-Chief always has some control over what is accepted and what not. Setting the status of a paper to "accepted" releases an automatic message to the publisher, signalling that the paper is now ready to be processed.

  8. Any changes to the page to become effective must be confirmed by pressing the [Save] button. The [Cancel] button will get you back to the list of articles without change. The [TeX Preview] button renders the tile, key words and abstract with the MathJax engine (just like the finished article on the public homepage) and will rarely by useful for the editors.
  9. At the bottom of each article's page, there is a dropdown list of all the EiC and ME's (Editor(s)-in-Chief and Managing Editor(s)) of the corresponding journal. Select one and click the envelope to open a message window containing the recipient's email address, name, and a link to the corresponding article. The idea is that editors can use this feature for their communication to the EiC's and ME's by simply editing the message. This will be particularly handy when recommending an article for acceptance if the editor (as by default) doesn't have permission to accept himself.