“What’s next?”

Being really productive requires always knowing how to answer that question, but when you’re working with a team of editors on an academic journal it can be hard to keep track of who’s done what and which tasks remain outstanding. This is made doubly difficult by the fact that editorial teams are often geographically distributed and most members have many other responsibilities. So, when you’re ready to put some time into moving your submissions through the editorial process, you want to instantly know exactly what each manuscript needs done and when - you want to know “what’s next.”

Scholastica’s goal is to provide the best possible tools for publishing academic journals, so we’ve been working on the “What’s next” problem for journals and we’re excited to announce a new solution: manuscript todos.

Now, when you log into Scholastica and go to your journal, the first thing you’ll see is your Todo Dashboard. Your Todo Dashboard is a collection of all your journal’s todos across all manuscripts. We’ve built in filters so that as the list grows, you can drill down into just the tasks assigned to you, or just the tasks you’ve assigned to others, or just the completed tasks, or just the late tasks, or just the late tasks you’ve assigned to Jane, or… OK, you get the idea.

Todo Dashboard

Each todo is associated with a single manuscript and assigned by one editor to another (or to themself). You can view all the todos for a manuscript on that manuscript’s page - there’s a new section in the manuscript work area just for todos, which is also where you create new todos.

Create a todo

Here’s our help article with all the details on how Todos work.

As a quick overview, you can add a description to a todo, comment on it and discuss it with your team, edit any of its attributes, and - of course - complete it. When you’ve completed a task, you’ll check the box for that todo and see it move over to the completed section (how satisfying!). Completing a task also emails the person who assigned it, so everyone can stay up to date.

And you’ll all know exactly what’s next.

Austin Brown
This post was written by Austin Brown