EDITORIAL

ABO entered ScholarOne System

Wallace Chamon

Physician, Department of Ophthalmology, Escola Paulista de Medicina - EPM, Universidade Federal de São Paulo - UNIFESP - São Paulo (SP), Brazil

The editorial process of a scientific journal involves highly specialized skills and hard work of many contributors, including editors and reviewers. These tasks require not only the intellectual competence of each but also hours of administrative work, evaluating manuscripts and maintaining the flow of publications in progress. The flow of the peer review process in ABO initiates through the editorial office to ensure that manuscripts have fulfilled all technical conditions before being sent for editorial review. It is up to the office to ensure that the limits of text and figures have been complied with in accordance with the different types of articles accepted, and confirm that the forms of potential conflicts of interest, authors' participation and approval by research ethics committees are adequate. Once these assumptions have been met, the manuscripts are forwarded to the chief editor who initially evaluates the manuscript to ensure that the text conforms to the scope of the journal, and suggests to the associate editor the strengths, weaknesses and the scientific questions that can be considered during peer review. The associate editor is responsible for overseeing the manuscript until its final decision, whether to be published or rejected. To make this decision, the associate editors rely on help from reviewers, who anonymously evaluate manuscripts, making suggestions as to content and form, with the goal of improving the final work. Reviewers are divided into members of the editorial board, listed by name in all publications and on the website of the ABO, and reviewers "ad hoc" that are cited in an annual thanks note published in the journal. After a few rounds of evaluation between authors and reviewers, under the coordination of associate editors, each accepted manuscript is forwarded to the technical teams of editors, layout and printing.

Next year will begin the renovation of the national and international members of the ABO editorial board and, as recognition, many reviewers "ad hoc" will be listed in the editorial board of the journal. The goal is to keep as a member of the editorial board only persons who have helped to accelerate the peer review process with quality and timely revisions.

The flow of peer review is managed in different ways in different scientific journals. From a physical process, mailing hard copied articles or the use of simplified electronic processes as electronic messaging or the use of automated systems with internet-based interfaces. The ABO, like all other scientific journals, has gone through all these stages over the past 15 years. Two years ago we started using the SciELO submissions system and have more than 360 manuscripts evaluated using this interface, from which about 50% have already been published. This system was created by SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and is an initiative that has the support of FAPESP (Foundation for Research Support of the State of São Paulo), BIREME (Regional Library of Medicine) and CNPq (National Council of Scientific and Technological Development). This interface utilizes a system based on an open-code software called Open Systems Journal, developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Although the platform has been built with options for several languages, the increase of its use has generated some difficulties for authors, especially international ones.

With the advancement of global exposure of ABO, many authors who do not master the Portuguese language have considered our journal for their publications. Over the past 24 months, among the manuscripts sent for review, about 45% were not in English and 15% not included Brazilian authors. This fact opens the door for the Brazilian ophthalmology to be internationally recognized and increases our responsibility.

Maintaining its continuous support to Brazilian and Latin American scientific journals, SciELO decided to start a partnership with Thomson Reuters for the use of ScholarOne system of peer review. ABO was invited by SciELO recently, and we are one of the first journals to be part of this partnership. The possibility of being part of ScholarOne offers to authors the opportunity to use a submission system already known and used by renowned journals such as IOVS or the British Journal of Ophthalmology. We believe that this feature will further increase the exposure of, and demand for ABO worldwide.

The basis of the success of a scientific journal is the publication of high quality articles that may be cited by other manuscripts of journals indexed in scientific databases. All editorial effort will not be worth if, in the end, the "product" of the journal (scientific papers) has no quality. This leads to a cycle where the publication of good articles improves the qualification of the journal and journals with good qualifications are sought to publish good articles. Increasing the base of authors submitting their manuscripts increases the chance of having better quality ones and meets our goal of raising the qualification of ABO. It is up to the editors and reviewers of ABO the arduous task of making the appropriate selection of articles, publishing those who have better scientific quality. This is a long but doable way.

Submitted for publication: October 5, 2012
Accepted for publication: October 5, 2012

Funding: No specific financial support was available for this study.
Disclosure of potencial of interest: W.Chamon, None.

Wallace Chamon