Challenges Facing INFORMS Journals: The Way Forward

INFORMS journals play a critical role in the Institute’s strategic goal of advancing the science and technology of decision-making and elevating its impact. We rely on the creativity and tireless work of our community to write, referee and present their most impactful work via our 17 peer-reviewed journals.

The role of INFORMS in publishing this work is both a tremendous honor and a challenging endeavor. Our journals have seen consistent growth over the past decade – in 2020, INFORMS journals saw nearly 10,000 submissions, accepted more than 1,200 papers and published more than 20,000 pages across 83 issues. None of this would be possible without the support of the thousands of volunteers who serve as editors, editorial board members and reviewers, or the thousands of authors who entrust us to handle their submissions in a fair, ethical and professional manner. 

INFORMS journals are well regarded, with seven appearing on the Financial Times FT50 list and many A-listed within business and engineering schools. However, a common point of feedback is that INFORMS is too slow in review and in getting accepted articles published online. With this article, we want to directly acknowledge this feedback and describe areas where we have made notable progress in reducing these delays. Where our efforts still need work – and several such areas indeed remain – we discuss some of the efforts underway to improve performance.

Time in Review

Each INFORMS journal is reviewed every three years by a committee chaired by a prominent expert in that journal’s field. This review includes an in-depth stakeholder survey to ensure the journal is meeting the needs of its community. In addition, in 2020, INFORMS empaneled an ad hoc committee to comprehensively review the review process itself and provide recommendations for improvement.  Solutions that fit one constituency may not fit all, but our journal editors have undertaken a number of innovations to improve time in review, including:

• clarifying reviewer instructions to achieve more focused feedback;
• establishing caps on the number of revisions a paper will receive before a final decision;
• creating expedited workflows for fast-tracking innovative research; and
• where appropriate, reorganizing editorial boards to better handle the editorial needs of the journal.

INFORMS is also more effectively utilizing the existing tools in the peer review software to manage due dates and proactively monitor for papers that are in danger of protracted review.

Time in Production

Several years ago, it became clear that INFORMS was not equipped to handle the ongoing growth in accepted papers and their production for online and ultimately print publication. To provide long-term scalability, INFORMS completely restructured the production process, partnering with a publication services vendor to manage the life of a paper from acceptance through publication. From January 2019 forward, we began to see good progress in reducing time to publication, and to date have achieved a 39% reduction in production time. 

Still, this reduction has not been as fast, sustained or significant as hoped. INFORMS does not view the status quo as being OK, and the Publication Department’s desire to fix its production time is as strong as ever.

Two factors are currently contributing to a stall in progress. First, our production vendor acquired their largest competitor in November 2020. Former rivals were charged with merging their workplace cultures, which, perhaps surprisingly, presented a much larger challenge than anticipated for aligning two workplaces that had been doing essentially the same type of work. In March 2021, INFORMS began to see a significant uptick in quality concerns, requiring several small publishing pauses while quality control measures were improved. Second, the tragic recent surge in COVID-19 in India has understandably resulted in a significant impact on our overseas production team. Whereas in February and March INFORMS published 200+ articles each month, we were only able to publish roughly 60 articles per month in April, May and June.

Still to Come

While significant efforts to restore operational excellence are top priority, there remain a number of improvements that we are excited to announce. Throughout 2020, INFORMS implemented several additional authentication pathways for ensuring that off-campus users could still access their institution’s subscription holdings while remote. This undoubtedly contributed to our journals reaching just shy of 2.9 million downloads in 2020, a nearly 8% increase in usage over the previous year.

INFORMS also continues its efforts to improve the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) of the journals. In July 2021, Service Science published a comprehensive study of INFORMS’ editorial board diversity, which includes a network analysis of co-author relationships between editorial board members [1]. To improve transparency and accountability on this important issue, INFORMS has begun to publish dashboards of editorial board diversity on each journal website. Visit pubsonline.informs.org to check them out. In addition, this summer the INFORMS Board approved important changes to INFORMS governance policies to ensure that DEI is front and center of editorial search and review procedures, and INFORMS is working on developing anti-bias training for volunteer leaders to help recognize unconscious bias. INFORMS is grateful for the leadership and engagement of its volunteer community for helping to turn this vision into actions and policies.

Relatedly, further enhancements are underway for the PubsOnline platform to improve the accessibility of journal content, including the introduction of full-text XML for all INFORMS journals (this is currently in place for only three of them) and support for screen readers for users with visual impairment.

The Big Picture

The global community’s interest in INFORMS publications, as measured by submissions and downloads, is at an all-time high. So is the number of INFORMS journals and total pages produced. INFORMS understands that its ability to meet the challenges of refereeing and publishing this unprecedented volume of journal papers will in no small part determine our ability to remain at the forefront of disseminating the most significant operations research, management science and analytics studies in the coming decade. We are determined to continuously improve each of the interlocking systems that take our authors’ hard work from initial submission to widely disseminated INFORMS journal papers.

References

1. Laker J. Newhouse and Margaret L. Brandeau, 2021, "Who Are the Gatekeepers? An Examination of Diversity in INFORMS Journal Editorial Boards," Service Science, July 9, https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2021.0274.