The hurdles of academic publishing from the perspective of journal editors: a case study

In this paper, we provide insight into the editorial process as seen from the perspective of journal editors. We study a dataset obtained from the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society, which contains information about submitted and rejected manuscripts, in order to find differences between local (Serbian) and external (non-Serbian) submissions. We show that external submissions (mainly from India, Iran and China) constitute the majority of all submissions, while local submissions are in the minority. Most of submissions are rejected for technical reasons (e.g. wrong manuscript formatting or problems with images) and many users resubmit the same paper without making necessary corrections. Manuscripts with just one author are less likely to pass the technical check, which can be attributed to missing metadata. Articles from local authors are better prepared and require fewer resubmissions on average before they are accepted for peer review. The peer review process for local submissions takes less time than for external papers and local submissions are more likely to be accepted for publication. Also, while there are more men than women among external users, this trend is reversed for local users. In the combined group of local and external users, articles submitted by women are more likely to be published than articles submitted by men.