Editorial

Healthc Inform Res. 2018 January;24(1):1-2.

A New Online Journal Management System

In 2009, the HIR Editorial Board took steps to publish a With much interest and attention from international authors
new journal in English, one of which was the adoption of an and readers, HIR has achieved great success in being indexed
online submission and peer review system. Systems for aca- in internationally renowned databases such as PubMed Cen-
demic journals have existed for less than a decade and have tral, Scopus, and ESCI (Emerging Source Citation Index).
become increasingly common in the last few years [1]. They We, all editorial board and KOSMI members, appreciate the
are designed to make the publishing process more efficient INFOrang system for the achievement.
and readily accessible to authors and reviewers from all over Now we want to upgrade our journal management system
the world and to accelerate and simplify the process for edi- as a strategy to leap forward. A system with more advanced
tors while reducing the related administrative loads. functions such as reviewer recommendation, plagiarism
The taskforce of the Editorial Board investigated and re- check, security will be able to assist the editorial process
viewed the available systems used in various disciplines do- more efficiently and effectively. With the rapid development
mestically and abroad. There were many different electronic and diffusion of information systems, most of the programs
publishing systems at varying stages of evolution and degrees available work in a similar way [6]. Through another in-
of adoption [2,3]. The taskforce contacted a few representa- depth investigation and discussion of up-to-date journal
tives of online systems run by well-known international pub- management systems [7], the taskforce has come to make a
lishing companies because it was expected that those systems critical decision on the system. We decided to adopt the Edi-
were already well established and the accessibility to authors torial Manager (Aries Systems, North Andover, MA, USA)
and readers was high. However, the cost of constructing and as a new system for expanding the global reach of HIR [8].
operating the system was too high for our academic society As an online manuscript submission and tracking sys-
to afford. tem, the Editorial Manager provides a suite of customizable
After careful consideration, the taskforce decided to build manuscript tracking and reporting tools for authors, review-
a system through the domestic company, ‘INFOrang’ [4]. ers, editors, and editorial office staff from submission to
This company was one of the companies that had relatively peer review and production. Specifically, Editorial Manager
extensive experience in publishing journals in Korea, was is a Software as a Service (SaaS)-based manuscript submis-
within our budget range, and had the advantage of being in sion and peer-review tracking system for scholarly journals
the same lineup as the company making the printed copies supporting pre-press function and digital workflows. This
of our journal, ‘MEDrang’ [5]. system provides highly configurable content management to
In the last 8 years, our journal HIR has made progress. streamline communication between editors, reviewers and
authors, and manages metadata and files. It provides reliable
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Com-
hosting infrastructures through regular security audits, at
mons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- least 99.95% availability and a dual, geographically separate
nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduc-
tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. disaster recovery center. As authors, reviewers, and editors,
ⓒ 2018 The Korean Society of Medical Informatics you can experience state-of-the-art features related to article
publish management system. Some features are highlighted
Hyejung Chang and Hyoun-Joong Kong

as follows. References
Authors submit manuscript files and metadata and act on
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2 www.e-hir.org https://doi.org/10.4258/hir.2018.24.1.1