“Billing starts at the moment of submission”
Invoices showing incorrect or incomplete statements as well as insufficient reports very often result from shortcomings at the very beginning of the publishing process, namely the moment of paper submission. At this stage key information required for invoicing and reporting should be collected:
– Who is going to pay the APCs?
– Is the author entiteled to benefit from an institutional payment scheme?
We believe that the more information will be collected during the submission process, the smoother all further transactions will be. Subsequent data acquisition, possibly in a seperate third-party system, can easily lead to unreasonable transaction costs.
Submission systems therefore should
- identify authors‘ affiliations based on the author’s details, IP adresses, email accounts and the details as indicated in the article itself
- indicate/ display institutional arrangements and/ or alert authors on central payment agreements
- be easy to use
- integrate ORCID