How satisfied are authors with our service?

Abstract

The editorial team of Acta Neuropathologica and Springer Publishers are working hard to provide authors with the best editorial and publishing service. To learn about authors’ views we have performed an author survey. Since early 2007 we have mailed short questionnaires to all corresponding authors of papers submitted between January 2007 and May 2008, usually within 2 or 8 weeks after the Wnal decision of acceptance or rejection, respectively. A total of 305 authors participated, corresponding to a response rate of 68% (81% after acceptance, 59% after rejection). As illustrated in Fig. 1, our performance was rated by the great majority of authors as good or very good with respect to all items, including convenience of online submission system (91%), fairness of reviews and editorial handling (78%), quality of reviews (68%), speed of editorial decision (91%), interaction with editorial oYce (92%), visibility of the journal (76%) and overall quality of the journal (88%). On average, authors of rejected papers rated all items less favorably than authors of accepted papers (p < 0.02), including items unrelated to decision, such as convenience of online submission system. In fact, no author of an accepted paper rated submission system, fairness, speed of decision or interaction with editorial oYce as poor or very poor. As many as 95% of authors of accepted papers intend to submit again to Acta Neuropathologica, while even among authors of rejected papers only 2% of respondents do not wish to submit other papers to this journal. Furthermore, among authors of accepted papers only very few rendered “poor” or “very poor” ratings for technical quality of proofs (2%), speed of proof production (2%), speed of online publication (1%) and interaction with publisher (6%), while the vast majority of authors was satisWed with the production process. The higher rating for satisfaction by authors of accepted compared with rejected manuscripts conWrms Wndings of a few previously published author surveys [1, 2]. Although the results of this survey are quite positive, they leave room for improvement. All authors who rated at least one item as poor or very poor were asked for details. Furthermore, the survey included space for comments and suggestions. All suggestions were carefully considered and discussed by the editorial team. Some critique was understandable but no remedy was available (“make open access cheaper”, “reviewers did not understand importance of my data”). A few authors whose papers had been rejected straightaway without external review (currently about 22% of papers) were dissatisWed and recommended external review of all papers. Other points of critique, however, have entailed amendments, such as improving technical issues and informations during online submission as well as changing procedures for solving occasional interaction problems between author and publisher. W. Paulus (&) · R. Mersmann · M. Hasselblatt Institute of Neuropathology, University Hospital Munster, Domagkstr. 19, 48129 Munster, Germany e-mail: werner.paulus@uni-muenster.de