Inside Morressier
Each month, our CEO shares his thoughts on the trends shaping the scholarly communications industry.
April 2o24
The future of journal submissions and peer review takes shape
It’s been a year since we announced our partnership with IOP Publishing to build the next-generation journal submission and peer-review system. Put simply, we’re betting big on this to push the industry forward and to advance our mission. So what have we been up to over the last 12 months?
With user experience as our north star, and with automation to support research integrity every step of the way, Journal Manager is going to feel quite unlike any submission system that’s come before. We are aiming to slash the time it takes for authors to submit, while making the experience smooth and easy for peer reviewers and editors.
Building a new submission system is a heavy lift, and we’re taking on the challenge with humility and awareness of the myriad failed ventures that precede us (Clarke & Esposito’s reflections make for an entertaining read on the topic). It’s for this reason that we’ve been working behind closed doors through this initial phase, in close collaboration with partners IOP Publishing.
The first version of Journal Manager will be released in Q4 2024 with a general release scheduled for early 2025. And we’re SO excited to share more detail on our approach and to get this into your hands to test. We’re first going to share progress with our strategic advisory board in May, and we’ll be ready to demo the system in person at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October. If you’re keen to be kept informed about this event or other opportunities, such as limited-invite webinars, register your interest via this form.
It’s time for our industry to reimagine its approach to infrastructure
When we started Morressier, my co-founders and I were aware that other industries – such as banking, music, and enterprise software – were undergoing massive transformations in which connectivity, data, and scale were bringing radical change, better user experiences, and opening up new business models. We set out to help the scholarly communications industry in its own transformation.
As we plan to bring the next-generation journal submission and peer-review platform to market, we are speaking with early clients and other stakeholders, some of whom are simply curious about what we’re doing. These conversations reveal a range of challenges that societies and publishers share, and we’re getting really excited about the ways in which we’re going to be supporting them to achieve deep and meaningful change. They need to not only survive in a market that is facing downward pressure on cost per article, but to rapidly adapt to face up to an integrity crisis if they are to continue to act as effective stewards of the scientific record. It’s important work, and they need to be relentless in their pursuit of efficiency gains.
From the perspective of a technology partner like Morressier, we are busy solving so many things as we prepare for the launch of Journal Manager: from understanding user needs and anticipating community adoption, to technical challenges of scale, stability and security. But what keeps me awake at night is… procurement.
There are some really good reasons that societies and publishers have set up their governance and procurement systems as they have. For instance, they need to ensure that infrastructure partnerships are reliable, cost-effective and will support their businesses over the long term. However, having been on the supplier side of RFPs in this industry, I’m concerned that many organizations are severely limiting themselves by being feature-driven and demanding what’s familiar, even if it’s broken. When technology changes, business processes need to adapt.
It reminds me of the old “Get a Mac” campaign that launched in 2006. At the time, PCs were marketed based on features, components, accessories, and esoteric measures of the performance of chipsets. Apple disrupted things by not designing or marketing to these measures: they focused on enabling users to be creative and enjoy whatever they needed to do. They achieved this by offering an integrated product – basically a platform in a modern sense – from silicone to software and services, rendering values such as CPU clock speed and RAM much less meaningful as measures of real-world performance. Like Apple, at Morressier, we’ve adopted a “it just works” design philosophy, and we’re reimagining workflows from the ground up to bring new efficiencies, a peerless user experience, and integrity protection at every step.
Software and business processes inform one another. We’re entering a new reality where societies and publishers will be able to innovate and iterate in ways that legacy software simply didn’t allow. We’re conscious that we will need to support our clients in their individual transition journeys and we’ve developed a process mapping exercise that acts as a discovery phase in this support. I’d be delighted to offer this exercise for your organization – reach out if you are interested. My only ask is that you indulge me in the idea that technology can lead to new ways of doing things, together.
May 2024
How we measure success at Morressier
When we sat down with IOP Publishing to build a new journal submission and peer review system, we started with the question, What does amazing look like?
Sitting with a blank canvas is both exciting and daunting and we realized early on that we would need to constrain ourselves to some well-defined success metrics. Based on a lot of research with IOPP teams around the business of academic publishing and the experience of its key stakeholders – including authors, reviewers, and editors – we set ourselves the following KPIs:
- Completion rate: How many authors successfully submit a manuscript?
- Time to submit: How easily can authors submit?
- Author satisfaction: How good was the author's experience?
- Author Retention: How many authors return to submit in future?
As we’ve progressed through this project, and we’re preparing to onboard the first journals in Q3, we have built a solid understanding of what success in these areas will translate to for different stakeholder groups.
For publishers, we’re looking to slash the time it takes to bring a journal to market. This flexibility is essential for smaller and mid-sized publishers to be able to compete in a rapidly-shifting landscape, and we’re aiming for a journal launch time of under 5 days and a transfer acceptance rate of 40%. This is a 10x improvement on current industry standards.
For editors, we’re looking for a 33% increase in efficiency, reducing their average manuscript touch time to under an hour and increasing reviewer acceptance rates by 25%. This frees up their time to deal with more problematic submissions, maintaining rigorous quality standards in the scientific record.
For authors, we’re aiming for average submission times of under 15 minutes, which is 3x faster than current benchmarks. The author experience has to be out-of-this-world and we’re looking for net promoter scores of above +50.
As we build towards these ambitious goals, we’re going to be working with more publishers as design partners for Journal Manager. If you’re excited about what we’re trying to achieve – and more importantly, what it could do for your organization – reach out to me to discuss whether you could be a good fit to become a Morressier design partner.