6 July 2020
NISO has announced the publication of NISO RP-30-2020, Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) Recommended Practice — an open protocol for the transfer of manuscripts within and between manuscript systems. As well as developing a common vocabulary, the MECA Working Group has also made specific recommendations for transmitting, identifying, and packaging the content being transferred.
An estimated 15 million hours are currently wasted each year repeating reviews for articles that have been rejected — not to mention the additional time spent re-submitting those articles. The MECA Recommended Practice, which incorporates feedback from the community, will improve this frustrating and time-consuming experience for authors, reviewers, and publishers alike. It covers the transfer of manuscripts and/or reviews between submission systems, between preprint and submission systems, from authoring systems to submission systems, and from submission systems to services such as post acceptance processing systems.
Tony Alves, Director of Product Management, Aries Systems, and co-chair of the Working Group, noted, “The MECA Recommended Practice will alleviate some significant pain points for researchers, publishers, and service providers. We welcome NISO’s publication of our recommendations and hope that they will be widely adopted and implemented by our community.”
The MECA Recommended Practice is now freely available to the community.