Precautions against “Research Square Author dashboard” to Fisheries Science authors
Yohihiro Ochiai, Editor-in-Chief
From this year, a new tool for authors of Springer journals including Fisheries Science, called “Author dashboard,” has been launched to enhance transparency of the peer reviw process. By using this tool, authors can check detailed status of their submissions such as dates of reviewer assignment and review result submission, which are not shown in the history view of the Editorial Manager.
To use the Author dashboard, the author is required to subscribe the service by responding to the notification from the service provider, Research Square, and to access the website of Research Square Author dashboard from a link embedded in the E-mail. For your information, Research Square is a company sponsored by Springer, a pubisher of Fisheries Science.
However, there is one very important point which needs authors’ precaution in the use of this tool.
For the website of Author dashboard contains links to other services provided by Research Square, one can easily access to a preprint server service of this company in which the author can publish one’s manuscript to the public, parallel to the review by peers of Fisheries Science, and ask for free comments from anyone other than the Editor and Reviewers of Fisheries Science. This is technically capable, but this is not allowed under the present policy of Fisheries Science that prohibits preprint publication of a manuscript which is not yet accepted for publication in the journal. In this course, the manuscript published in the Research Square preprint server or any other similar service will lose a qualification to receive peer review by the Editorial Board of Fisheries Science due to the infringement of the journal’s provision for manuscript submission (https://www.miyagi.kopas.co.jp/JSFS/PUBS/KITEI/toukoukitei.html), as is defined in the article 2 that “the manuscript is an original work, and it has never been and is not being submitted elsewhere.”
Thank you for your attention to this precaution and compliance with our editorial policy.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Editorial Office (fsjpubl@d1.dion.ne.jp).
