Fast-Tracking COVID-19 Research

Five Questions for Debbie McClanahan, KGL’s VP of Journal Publishing Services

by Mike Groth

Much has been written lately about the rush to quickly make new coronavirus research available to the medical community, government agencies, and the concerned public. Recent news and analysis ranges from scholarly publishers working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, to a demand for conclusiveness against an “infodemic” of both accurate and inaccurate guidance, to our own observations that preprints and media attention are driving rapid publication like never before.

Apart from the headlines, I wanted to look deeper into other areas of the research workflow that can be expedited in the cause of helping authors and publishers vet and distribute important discoveries. So I consulted one of our internal experts, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.’s Debbie McClanahan, VP of Journal Publishing Services, to draw on her decades of experience helping academic publishers take their content from accepted manuscript to copyedited, typeset and verified articles available for download.

MG: Tell us a bit about what you do for KGL and its journal customers?

DM: I am responsible for our journal content publishing operations, and work closely with STM publishers to manage their journal publications, regardless of the size of their programs. This could mean facilitating the content editorial and production of each publication, or introducing innovative workflow technologies to speed time to market of important and critical science.

MG: Have KGL’s customers seen an increase in submissions of papers exploring solutions to the current global health crisis?

DM: Across the journal publishers we work with, we have seen a significant increase in submissions related to COVID-19 research and the global pandemic in fields like clinical medicine, microbiology, physiology, and psychology. In each case, those publishers are pushing for record-setting turnaround times from submission through online delivery of these articles. 

MG: What role does the company play in bringing this critical research to publication?

DM: KGL has always led the industry in providing accelerated turnaround times, as part of our standard journal production workflows. We have seen expected turnaround times move from months, to weeks, to days, and most recently as the need to publish important COVID-19 articles grows, to hours.

Our role in facilitating the publication of timely research, as has always been the case, is to ensure there are efficient workflows, automated processes, and the highest quality starting with managing the peer review process, to copyediting, to composition, through the delivery of critical XML content.

Our AI-powered Smart Suite publishing engine is the tool we use to fast-track production of priority articles, allowing the pre-edit and copyedit phase to be condensed to a few hours versus one-to-two days. Authors and journal offices of the COVID-19 articles are eager to also reduce the amount of time they would normally take for review of proofs, which Smart Suite automates in a self-service interface. Lastly, the XML deliverables are sheltered through this last step in the process with close oversight and accelerated speed.

MG: What is different about scholarly communications during these extraordinary times?

DM: KGL has addressed in a prior article how publishers are putting AI to use during the pandemic. But I think there has been an increasing comfort level among publishers with intelligent automation, even before the urgent need for expedited content. Language quality analysis and copyediting have traditionally been bottlenecks in the process and there are ever more popular AI solutions to speed up peer review—from assessing novel concepts against the current literature, to matching articles to journals or even reviewers. Recent developments will only hasten this adoption.

Back to KGL, we are seeing some publishers significantly reduce the required level of copyediting, to further reduce time to publication of COVID-19 articles; and, of course, the majority of these articles are open access.

MG: What is the first thing you will do once released from lockdown?

DM: Enjoy a glass of wine with friends and family (and an urgent salon appointment)!

Debbie McClanahan has worked in editorial, production, and customer service roles since 1971 for KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd., its predecessors (including Cenveo), and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins. You can reach her via email at info@kwglobal.com.