scope:

Purpose and Scope

Authors experience loss of time and effort when their manuscript is rejected by a journal and they have to repeat the submission process with one or more subsequent journals. In addition, it is estimated that 15 million hours of researcher time is wasted each year repeating reviews on subsequent journals. Both of these industry challenges could be addressed if journals and publishers had a way to transfer manuscripts seamlessly between publications using different submission and peer review tracking systems.

With the growth of cascading workflows, manuscripts may be transferred within a publishing group. A growing challenge is to transfer the manuscript (and, optionally, peer review data) across publishers and manuscript systems and even to and from preprint servers. There are many manuscript management systems, especially when including publishers' custom-built systems.

A group of manuscript/management suppliers and publishers have worked to develop a common approach that can be widely adopted across the industry. The Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) project has created a website and briefed industry groups through a variety of outreach efforts.

The following principles guide the MECA project:

1. Journals and authors set the rules on what metadata and files are transferred to another system.

2. The goal is to facilitate transfer between publications and platforms. The package may not represent a complete submission, but it should contain enough data and files to create a record in the receiving system. MECA defines the minimal set of data required to initiate a submission.

3. Various systems can independently define a Minimal Viable Product to get started with submission transfers.

4. The MECA practice uses current common technology and industry standards.

5. MECA presents a set of recommendations but does not prescribe specific code to be written. There is no hub, software, or service. Unlike Crossref or ORCID, there is no attempt to trace the path of a manuscript as it traverses the publishing ecosystem.

The project addresses the following use cases for manuscript transfer across boundaries:

1. Submission system to submission system.

2. Preprint system to and from a submission system.

3. Authoring systems to submission systems.

4. Submission system to various services, e.g., post acceptance processing systems.