The Publication Process in Personality Science

The infographic below shows the full workflow process of a successful paper in Personality Science (i.e., assuming that a submitted manuscript is eventually accepted and published). As can be seen, there are five major steps involved: (A) the submission, (B) the pre-publication peer-review process (with a decision on the manuscript), (C) production of the final article, (D) publication of the produced article, and (E) in some cases potentially post-publication peer-review (though this may be tested for specific papers initially and be rolled out continually; see here). Each of these steps comes with several sub-steps (A1-A4; B1-B7; C1-C4; D1-D7; E1-E8; F1-F6). Each of the sub-steps is color-coded, signifying who is responsible or the main person(s) involved. For example, authors are responsible for the blue-shaded boxes (i.e., A1, A2, B5, B6, C2, D2, D6, E8).

This is a highly simplified workflow, and individual submission trajectories may of course vary. Further, if there are problems or issues, then these may involve additional work (e.g., at C3 the editorial assistant finds that supplements have not been uploaded properly, so authors are contacted to rectify this in order to proceed with the to-be-accepted paper). We thus ask authors to please be conscious that the right preparation of the manuscript with its supplements (if any) and responsiveness to correspondence from the editorial office significantly impact the timeline of the manuscript. Thus, we advise that authors pay careful attention to Sub-steps A1, A2, and C2: preparing the manuscript and any supplements (should there be any) with the official templates and in accordance with the journal's policies, Open Science standards, recommendations for paper formats, and author guidelines.