Preflight For Editorial Desk: The Perfect Hybrid (AI + Human) Assistance Against Compromised Manuscripts

In an evolving academic publishing landscape, and with increasing number of submissions, journal editorial desks are weighed down by increasing demands. From heavy workloads to mounting costs, paper mills, and AI evasion, there are many hurdles to overcome. The increasing use of AI, while offering promising solutions for authors, has also led to concerns about research integrity and the quality of publications. Today, Paperpal is proud to introduce Preflight For Editorial Desk, the perfect assistant, with AI and human checks, to shield your academic journals against compromised manuscripts.

Table of Contents

• Challenges for Journal Editorial Desks
• Introducing Preflight for Editorial Desk
• How Preflight for Editorial Desk Works
• What Do You Get with Preflight for Editorial Desk?
• Why Choose Preflight for Editorial Desk?                             

Challenges for Journal Editorial Desks

As of September 2023, Retraction Watch has recorded over 42,000 retractions, due to undetected errors or fraud, eroding the credibility and reputation of academic publishers. That being said, most editorial teams grapple with:

• Heavy workloads: Journal editorial desks are required to manually evaluate submitted manuscripts while maintaining quality and efficiency. However, the growth in the number of manuscript submissions is adding to the overwhelming workload for editorial teams and leading to longer publication timelines.
• High costs: Manual checks to ensure research integrity, technical compliance, and language quality can be time-consuming and costly, driving up the overall operational cost of journal publications. 
• AI-Authenticity challenges: The increasing use of AI tools in academic writing has raised concerns about research authenticity. When you add the rapid rise of paper mills and fraudulent practices to evade AI detection, it means the editorial desk has to work that much harder to ensure scientific integrity.
• Compromised manuscripts: Despite best efforts, some manuscripts with quality or research integrity issues may slip through the editorial desk, leading to retractions later that hurt journal reputation.

Introducing Preflight for Editorial Desk

Preflight for Editorial Desk, a robust hybrid (AI + human) post-submission manuscript check, addresses these editorial desk challenges head-on and acts as a shield against compromised manuscripts. Trained on millions of published scholarly articles and harnessing 20+ years of experience helping researchers get published, Preflight’s AI has been carefully designed to assist academic publishers and journal editors. We offer over 35 categories of checks for research integrity, language quality, and technical compliance, with results presented in a comprehensive report, to help journal editors identify compromised manuscripts in minutes.

How Preflight for Editorial Desk Works

Preflight for Editorial Desk makes the evaluation process more efficient by quickly identifying potentially compromised manuscripts from the submissions received. Additionally, Preflight’s AI evaluates the manuscript against your journal submission guidelines, including language quality, and provides a comprehensive report in minutes. Our automated assessments deliver clear, consistent, and unbiased results, categorized under research integrity, technical compliance, and language quality to allow the editorial desk to review and make informed decisions faster.

If, however, you find the results of the integrity checks are inconclusive, unlike other solutions, Preflight gives you the option to request an IntegrityGUARD human check by our PhD technical reviewers who have broad subject matter expertise. In addition to analyzing the AI report, the technical reviewers will conduct a thorough review of the manuscript and conduct 40+ checks to evaluate and score the manuscript on integrity, transparency, and science to provide a conclusive result on overall integrity. The journal editors then have the option to view this report and download an edited version of the submission, if desired. This allows editors to make swift decisions on manuscript acceptance for peer review or rejection right at their desk.

What Do You Get with Preflight for Editorial Desk?

Research Integrity Check: Rigorously assesses manuscripts under three main categories – integrity, transparency, and science – to weed out issues with scope match, authorship, fabrication or duplication, ethical compliance, and reference quality.

Technical Compliance Check: Ensures that manuscripts adhere to technical standards and formatting guidelines specific to your journal, including checks for word limits, structure, citations and references, figures, and other technical elements.

Language Quality Check: Evaluates the clarity, coherence, and overall quality of language in submitted manuscripts and suggests improvements to enhance the readability and improve the impact of the research.

Why Choose Preflight for Editorial Desk?

Paperpal believes in providing authors and publishers with end-to-end support to ensure the highest quality of research gets published. With Preflight for Editorial Desk, we’re providing a comprehensive suite of checks that help journal editors ensure quality and boost efficiency. Here’s why you should choose Preflight for Editorial Desk:

1. Secure Solution by Experts: Preflight has been created and is continually improved by a team of 500+ specialist data scientists, linguists, and engineers. We implement the highest standards of data security to ensure data is always kept safe and protected from misuse.  
2. Time and Cost Savings: Preflight automates checks for research integrity, technical compliance, and language quality based on your journal requirements. This significantly reduces the time spent on manual evaluations, allowing editors to focus on higher-level decision-making. Furthermore, by replacing resource-intensive manual checks with AI precision, Preflight effectively reduces the costs associated with editorial processes.
3. Reduced risk of future retractions: Preflight helps tosafeguard your publishing reputation by avoiding compromised submissions, which helps publishers ensure a stronger and more trustworthy scholarly presence.
4. Comprehensive Checks: With 35+ categories of checks for research integrity, technical compliance, and language quality, Preflight ensures granular checks at the editorial desk. Every manuscript is rigorously assessed to ensure research quality and scientific integrity, which reduces the likelihood of retractions of potentially compromised publications.

A product by Paperpal, a brand under Cactus Communications, Preflight is advocated by 13 leading publishers and over 400 journals worldwide recommend using our precheck tool directly from the journal website. Now with Preflight for Editorial Desk, we’re all set to support publishers handling higher volumes of submissions with a smaller editorial desk, journals tapping research from newer geographies, or those struggling to identify paper mills or AI evasion to ensure scientific integrity. Preflight for Editorial Desk stands as the reliable AI assistant, supporting your editorial desk in upholding scientific integrity, streamlining processes, and elevating the quality of research publications. Choose Paperpal Preflight today to experience the transformation first-hand and achieve authenticity and academic quality in a click. If you’re interested in leveraging Paperpal Preflight for your journal editorial desk, write to us at preflight@paperpal.com and let’s talk!