Randall "MECA Project Update"
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This presentation was given by Laura Randall of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) during JATS-Con 2022. The event was held virtually from May 3-4, 2022.
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Randall "MECA Project Update"
- 1. MECA Project Update Laura Randall – Technical Information Specialist
- 2. Recap: What is MECA? • Manuscript Exchange Common Approach: NISO Recommended Practice (July 2020) • Create & transfer files in machine-readable way • System to system • To/from preprint servers & vendors • Time and effort saver!
- 3. MECA in Use • Cell Biology Transfer Network • Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Cell Biology, Molecular Biology of the Cell • Cross-publisher; cross-system • bioRxiv & medRxiv • Preprint server to journal • Journal to preprint server
- 4. NISO MECA Standing Committee Participating Organizations American Chemical Society American Diabetes Association American Physical Society Apex Covantage Aries Systems Corporation California Digital Library Clarivate Analytics Green Fifteen Publishing Consultancy Highwire Press IEEE Jisc National Library of Medicine Overleaf Public Knowledge Project Pubmill Public Library of Science River Valley Technologies Scholastica Taylor & Francis Group
- 5. NISO MECA Standing Committee Work areas: • Community outreach • Transfer protocol • SFTP; JSON + API • Peer review • JATS4R, STM, Crossref, DocMaps, ASAPBio PReF
- 6. NISO MECA Information • https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/meca • https://www.manuscriptexchange.org/
Editor's Notes
- If you’ve been a regular JATS-Con attendee for the past couple of years, the MECA project should be familiar. Today I’ll be providing an update on the project, but I’ll start with a recap of the project and then move on to the update and the current work items for the project.
- So the recap: the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach is a NISO Recommended Practice published in July 2020. It describes a method to package and transfer manuscript files among publishing partners—from authors to preprint servers to vendors and publishers—or any combination thereof. The goal is for the protocol to be easy-to-implement and to save time by reducing the amount of work that is usually duplicated during manuscript submission and review. (My elevator sales pitch.)
- I “borrowed” this slide from Tony Alves of Highwire, who is one of the co-chairs of the MECA Standing Committee, so I thank Tony for this info. Real world applications of MECA include The Cell Biology Transfer Network is a coalition of cell biology journals who use MECA to transfer articles between journals that are published by different publishers using different submission systems. Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Cell Biology and Molecular Biology of the Cell offer this manuscript transfer option to authors whose manuscripts have been declined. When a manuscript submitted to one of the participating journals is declined, the journal editor may offer the authors the opportunity to transfer their manuscript and reviewer comments between journal manuscript submission systems. Authors are given the option to update their manuscript files prior to resubmission. This manuscript transfer option not just alleviates the burden on authors, it also alleviates the burden on reviewers who may encounter the same manuscript from different journals. The preprint servers, bioRxiv and medRxiv also utilize MECA in their B2J and J2B offerings. B2J means transferring from their preprint server to a journal. It saves authors time in submitting papers to journals by transmitting their manuscript files and metadata directly from bioRxiv and medRxiv to one of many participating journals. This means authors do not have to spend time re-loading manuscript files and re-entering author information into the journal’s submission system. J2B means transferring a manuscript from a journal to a preprint server. Many journals are offering this service to their authors at the point of submission. Authors can choose to have the journal automatically transfer the new submission to bioRxiv or medRxiv, again, so that the author doesn’t have to go through the submission process twice.
- Since the RP was published, NISO convened a Standing Committee for the MECA project. As is the case with the NISO JATS Standing Committee, the MECA SC is working to improve the MECA RP to respond to the needs of the community. This table shows the organizations participating in the committee and you can see that there’s a wide range of organizations represented, making contributions to the group varied and representative of many different publishing requirements [cumbersome, clean up]
- Right now, the SC is focusing on 3 primary areas of work: publicity and outreach. Building community awareness is crucial to the success of the project, so there’s a concerted effort to do things like I’m doing now, making sure the community is aware of the project and which hopefully leads to more groups using it Transfer protocol: MECA 2.0, which is the published RP, specified transfer via SFTP. The original working group chose SFTP because of the perceived low barrier to adopting SFTP. Not all groups who want to use MECA can use it, however, so the SC is looking at JSON + API as an alternative. The group is actively testing this option utilizing the SWORD protocol. Then there’s peer review…sort of the elephant in the room right now. The original MECA RP include a modest peer review model, but as there are other groups who have developed taxonomies, terminologies, and guidelines, the SC is working to find a way to “play nice” with those other requirements. If you’re curious, here are some of those models we’re looking at and trying to accommodate.