Using Technology to Improve the Editorial Process

I was talking to the managing editor of one of the leading management journals recently concerning the reluctance to move to Web-based publishing. “The authors and the reviewers told us it’s far too much trouble to go through all those steps of uploading manuscripts or reviews when you can just put something in the mail or send an e-mail,” was her take on the question of technological change. I remembered that not too many years before this, as a reviewer for this particular journal, I was one of those Luddites resisting the introduction of paperless technology in the journal submission and review process. At the board meeting a young scholar had championed e-mail technology as permitting a reduction in the use of environmental resources as the main advantage over sending submissions to reviewers in the mail. But I, in common with most reviewers, always read print copies of papers, so switching to e-mail would involve transferring the cost of printing from the journal to the reviewers, as far as I, and the others, could see. There was no particular advantage in terms of saving the Earth! Thus, so long as the argument was made to move to new technology because it would save paper and other resources, this argument appeared to be flawed.