The American Meteorological Society (AMS) Publications Department is pleased to announce that it will be moving its peer review and manuscript production and tracking systems to the Aries Systems Editorial Manager (EM) and Preprint Manager (PM) during the summer of 2010 (http://www.editorialmanager.com/homepage/home.htm). The EM and PM will replace the author upload and the peer review and production tracking systems that were developed by the AMS.
The AMS has been dealing with a series of hardware and software issues that have made the current author upload and tracking systems problematic over the past year. In addition, the AMS does not have the resources to continue development and support of a complete author upload and tracking system. The Aries system is a commercial product that is well established in the scientific publishing industry and has an uptime of >99.98%.
Over the last year, the AMS has been working diligently to significantly reduce production times (i.e., the time from manuscript acceptance to appearance on our journal Web site). We have managed to reduce that time from a mean value of 270 days in January 2008 to its current time of less than 160 days. While this is a welcome reduction, the switch to EM and PM will allow the AMS to take advantage of many commercially available automated processes that will simplify many production tasks, with the hope of ultimately reducing production times to the 120-day range or even lower once Aries is fully implemented. Those types of efficiencies cannot be achieved with the present submission, production, and tracking systems without substantial new investments by the AMS. Additionally, authors will have a much-improved experience when uploading papers with the new system. Key features for authors include the ability to track their manuscript’s progress through the peer review and production process, full support for LaTeX submissions, a vastly improved interface, and single username and password login for all submissions.
Transition to the Aries system will begin during the summer of 2010. During this period the AMS will phase in implementation of EM and PM across all of its scholarly journals and the Bulletin (BAMS), resulting in much greater efficiency for authors from manuscript submission to publication. We anticipate that the transition will be completed by autumn of 2010. Aries staff are fully committed to assisting AMS in this transition and helping with improving our journal production process.
