Submitting a manuscript has never been simple. Researchers navigate a maze of journal requirements, formatting guidelines, and status updates — often before a single reviewer has seen their work. With AI reshaping nearly every corner of scholarly publishing, the submission experience is finally getting a rethink.
Back in May, Aries Systems and ChronosHub announced that they were partnering to launch a new “Enhanced Researcher Experience” within Aries’ Editorial Manager platform, in an effort to make that rethink a reality. So I asked Jennifer Fleet, Managing Director of Aries Systems, and Christian Grubak, CEO of ChronosHub, to share their thoughts on what authors, publishers, and other stakeholders want from the submission process today, what they’re likely to want tomorrow, and how they’re seeking to address this through their partnership.
Let’s start with the problem you’re both trying to solve. From where each of you sits, what are authors telling you about where the submission process falls short — and what do those friction points have in common?
Jennifer Fleet: There is often a lack of clarity at submission. This reflects the challenges that can arise from years of evolving user experience (UX) and the integration of multiple systems, creating friction points for authors. It’s not uncommon for authors to describe the submission process as taking a day or more because they need to collect or format additional items to finish the submission. It’s often not until they are in the submission process that they find this out. It leads me to a few different questions: Could we better articulate what is needed up front? And, more importantly, do we need the author to supply all of this, in specific formats, to begin with? I think the answer to the former is yes, and the latter is no. We could and should be making the submission process more streamlined and intuitive. Talking about improving the researcher experience has become commonplace; however, delivering it is something else entirely.
Christian Grubak: For me, it’s the lack of guidance. Authors simply aren’t given the right information at the point they need it. As Jennifer says, that’s the result of decades of UX neglect, and jamming together systems that don’t really integrate, leaving gaps for authors to fall through. But the deeper problem isn’t that submission is complicated. It’s that our industry has accepted unnecessary complexity for too long. Researchers are consumers too. Every day they use software that anticipates their needs, guides them through tasks, and quietly solves problems before they even notice them. Then they come to publishing. Suddenly they’re expected to interpret instructions, hunt for information, and hand over data the system could – and should – already know. That gap between what they expect and what they get is what we need to close.
Take metadata. In 2026, submissions still arrive with missing affiliations, incorrect email addresses, and mismatched funding information. None of this is hard to catch.These errors and omissions should be flagged right on the submission page for authors to double check, or better yet, extracted automatically from the manuscript and verify it against known systems of record e.g. ORCID, Ringgold, or ROR. When they aren’t caught, the odds of a desk rejection go up. That’s bad for the author of course. And editorial teams and reviewers also waste time fixing errors that should never have made it through the process.
How have author expectations changed over the last decade, and what should their experience ideally look like?
Christian: To answer, I’ll point to something I’ve seen a lot in this industry: the reluctance to tag authors, reviewers, or editors as “users.” Partly, that stems from academia’s humanistic tendencies, which I understand. But it also comes from picturing someone as occupying a specific role inside specialized scholarly publishing software and disregarding their experience everywhere else. Researchers don’t stop being digital consumers when they become authors. They expect software that’s intuitive, responsive, and helpful. But, in scholarly publishing, we end up comparing the user experience across peer review systems, rather than against a Spotify or an Amazon. Those platforms are built for ease and speed from the ground up, and they’ve set all our expectations for how intuitive software should feel. That’s the bar we need to design to meet. Scholarly publishing shouldn’t ask authors to lower it.
Jennifer: While I don’t disagree that we fail to see our community as “users” or even “customers” like Amazon or Spotify would, and this is often linked to our academic view of roles in publishing‚ it’s not solely on the shoulders of the technology solution companies to solve this with our products. We can’t make the systems truly frictionless until we find a more common way of working. I think there’s an opportunity here to talk about standardization and dropping the superfluous and often idiosyncratic requirements that publishers have. When publishers capture information consistently across journals, they’re better positioned to leverage AI, automate workflows, generate portfolio-wide insights, and introduce new capabilities that just aren’t possible in a highly customized environment. To be clear, the goal isn’t to eliminate the unique identity of each journal but to standardize the elements that enable greater efficiency, interoperability, and future innovation.
Why did Aries and ChronosHub decide to partner on the Enhanced Researcher Experience? What will change for authors?
Christian: This isn’t a lick of new paint. It’s a new experience built around the guidance I mentioned earlier. The author lands in a branded submission portal. From there, they can search across the publisher’s portfolio for relevant journals using the Journal Recommender, submit a manuscript, and track its status with real-time updates with the Manuscript Tracker, while data moves cleanly back and forth with Editorial Manager. Author guidelines, submission requirements, and funding information, all previously scattered across separate systems, live in one place.
Aries and ChronosHub share a belief in a more connected, researcher-centered publishing experience. We’re not trying to redesign peer review. Aries already provides a workflow engine the industry trusts, with the rules, stability, and trust that come from doing this for a long time. Our role is different: user experience, integration, and data. We aim to remove the friction around that engine, so the technology almost disappears. When software works well, researchers shouldn’t be thinking about the software. They should be thinking about their research. That’s the connective tissue turning a fragmented publishing journey into a coherent one for publishers and authors alike.
Jennifer: Aries initiated this partnership after hearing directly from our customers that improving the author experience in submission was a real priority for them. Rather than building something from scratch, we partnered with a platform already proven with customers like IEEE and ACS. Partnering has always been a core component of our strategy, and in ChronosHub we found a partner that had a proven author platform already in use by other publishing programs. We’re bringing all that experience to bear here. It’s also worth noting that ChronosHub and Aries already have a longstanding partnership on licensing and billing.
You’ve already got some early adopters. What are you learning from them? Any surprises?
Jennifer: It’s still early days, so I’ll hold off on naming specific publishers. But the conversations we’ve been having are encouraging, and the biggest theme so far is relief at how little disruption this joint approach causes. Our customers want innovation that enhances their existing workflows, not another platform to learn or a disruptive migration. That feedback shaped our strategy from the outset. Early discussions have reinforced that this approach resonates with customers, who appreciate gaining new capabilities while continuing to work within the platform they already know and trust. One challenge we quickly recognized through the Early Adopter Program was that assumptions made during development don’t always reflect how customers use the product in practice. Engaging customers early allowed us to identify gaps, incorporate their feedback, and refine the experience before broader rollout.
Christian: This aligns with our vision at ChronosHub: to connect systems, not replace them. Publishers’ daily work is built around Editorial Manager, so keeping that trusted base and adding a new layer on top has landed well.
When will this be available to all publishers, and what’s next?
Jennifer: Aries customers can enroll in the Early Adopter Program today to begin using key capabilities of the Enhanced Researcher Experience, including the new submission experience, manuscript tracking, journal catalog, and journal recommender. This is allowing us to gather customer feedback and further refine the experience ahead of broad release. General availability for the service is planned for late Q3 2026, when it will be available to all Editorial Manager customers.
Looking ahead, Aries and ChronosHub will continue to expand the capabilities of the Enhanced Researcher Experience, delivering new innovations that streamline the publishing journey while maintaining the core editorial workflows our customers rely on.
Christian: What’s next is pre-submission. There’s an opportunity to take checks that currently happen later‚ like scope or grammar‚ and move them to earlier in the process, so authors can improve their own manuscripts before anyone else sees them.
Funder requirements for open access, data sharing, and more continue to grow. How much of what you’re building is a response to funder pressure versus publisher demand versus author need? Are these ever in tension?
Christian: Many of the requirements that authors now navigate don’t show up in a typical submission experience. How’s an author supposed to know they’re compliant, or what they’ll pay? The pressure on publishers is just as real. Every non-compliant manuscript, every voucher applied after the fact, adds friction and cost downstream. Catching these issues upstream is how publishers avoid that cost. Mandates also arrive far faster than they did 10 years ago, and a system that needs to be custom engineered for every change won’t keep up. Do authors, editors, and publishers demand different things? Of course. But I think their read on the limitations of current publishing technology is pretty universal.
Jennifer: While there is certainly tension, I don’t think the needs and demands of funders, publishers, and authors are totally at odds. Everyone involved in the research community wants the work being done to have the greatest impact and, as technology solution providers serving this community, we need to find ways to make reaching that goal easier for all involved.
Looking ahead, what does the future of manuscript submission look like? Will submission systems even continue to exist as new forms of output become more commonplace?
Christian: Most people agree that the article as a static PDF is on its way out. Or at least, it will no longer be the main way of delivering research. Publishers’ own earnings calls already show AI-related revenue growing fast. To feed LLMs, submission systems need to capture a full data representation of the manuscript, one that can be sliced, protected, and reused efficiently. The business side will loosen up too. I expect publishers to move from long, rigid contracts toward flexible annual or quarterly arrangements, since they’ll need room to adapt as requirements change. However, something has to remain constant. That’s submission systems like Aries, which support the stable, trusted core of peer review. Above those systems sits a layer managing all that flux. That’s what we want ChronosHub to be.
Jennifer: I agree. The future is less focused on the format for readers and more on making the content accessible to both readers and the AI that is consuming it. Publishers are already making the shift from viewing their publications in terms of categories like journals, books, and conference proceedings, and viewing it all as their “content,” and this shift will intensify in the coming years. A flat PDF will not serve the purpose. We need to generate the full-text data of the manuscript to both drive efficiency in the peer review workflow through various AI-driven tools – such as automated taxonomy matching, contextual review, automated triage of submission components – and to make publication and content ingestion as efficient as possible. With the increase in papermills and unsuitable submissions, editors and reviewers need more tools to make their decisions easier and more quickly; and publishers need to make publication and content ingestion as efficient as possible. None of this works without a foundation of standardized, harmonized data. The AI tools are only as good as what they are fed; and if every publisher, system, and submission is structured differently, you lose the scale that makes these tools powerful. This approach unlocks time, money, and resources.
