Hindawi works with a large, diverse pool of contributors (in 2017 this included 76,000 authors, 11,000 editors and 46,000 reviewers from 178 countries). The scale of the publishing programme has made it challenging to develop a scalable publishing platform that works with advances in open science without becoming unmanageably complex.
The submission and review system follows an Editor-in-Chief-led workflow:
- An administrator role sets up the initial editorial board positions and can provide support at every stage of the process.
- Authors create accounts and submit manuscripts through a simple submission form.
- The designated EiC conducts an initial screening before assigning promising submissions to a handling editor.
- The handling editor makes a second assessment of the manuscript before deciding whether to invite external reviewers.
- After receiving a certain number of reviews and soliciting revisions from the authors, the handling editor makes a final recommendation to the EiC.
- The EiC makes a final decision on whether or not a manuscript should be published.
You can watch a video about the new review system here.