Ready for Sagetrack!

When Viviane Le Hay and I took over from Karl Van Meter as editors of the BMS, the issues were products of craftsmanship – I use this word in a positive sense, that of work carried out from start to finish by a qualified person using proven techniques. The texts were solicited or received by the editorial board, which evaluated them by calling on competent people, often chosen amongst their acquaintances; then the small team worked on the text with the authors and put it into format until it was time to entrust it to the editorial assistant of SAGE for production. First, we transformed the evaluation process of the BMS by aligning it with another model, that of the ‘peer-reviewed journals"; a more industrial model, insofar as it introduces a division of labour between the editors of the journal and the evaluators, with a so-called double-blind review process: the texts are anonymised and so are the evaluations. At the same time, we have invited colleagues to propose guest issues. To manage the increased complexity of the production process, we had to mobilise, still in an artisanal way – but understood this time in the negative sense of what is done with rudimentary means. That is to say, easily accessible tools, such as a spreadsheet shared in a Google directory, a Dropbox folder and, of course, a Gmail address. The contrast between these makeshift means and the industrial nature of our publisher, SAGE, was obvious. Indeed, there is something of a paradox in claiming a home-grown approach, on the fringes of developments in globalized science, in a journal published by SAGE. The breadth of our publisher’s ‘portfolio’ (which claims more than 1,000 journals) allows us to do as we please. Of course, the time we spend on the BMS is not paid for by the publisher (which however recompenses us once a year), but by our main employer (in this case, the CNRS); in return, SAGE produces and distributes the journal without any expectations in terms of profits or regarding the running of the journal. Recently, however, we have been strongly incentivized to adopt the Sagetrack online submission platform. The question had been put to us back in 2018. When consulted, the editorial board decided against it. Our respective experiences with this type of interface were not very positive and we feared that the formalism of this type of submission would have an effect on the articles proposed to us as well as on the reviewers. It seemed to us that, for a small journal like ours, it remained preferable to send personal messages to potential reviewers in order to obtain their agreements. Four years later, I recognise that a tool like ScholarOne – which SAGE is asking us to adopt – designed to simplify the tracking of the many operations involved in