Aries Systems are a bronze sponsor of the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2025. 

 

Scholarly journals perform a series of checks on submitted manuscripts to assess issues with language/quality, compliance with submission guidelines, and markers of fraudulent activities. Traditionally, this is a highly-manual, time-consuming, and skill-intensive process that places undue strain on the editorial desk, particularly when conducting integrity checks. As the volume of incoming submissions increase, many editorial offices find themselves over capacity, creating costly bottlenecks in the editorial workflow. Additionally, journals may apply their integrity policies inconsistently or lack the necessary expertise amongst their editorial staff to detect increasingly sophisticated fraudulent activity.

With advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and generative technology, papermills, and other bad actors, the tools needed for detection must be more specialized and innovative to prevent expensive retractions. Without this support, journals face several risks, including compromised research quality, increased pressure on editorial staff, increased costs and resource exhaustion, delays to publication, and threats to journals’ reputation and integrity standards. 

Addressing research integrity challenges often requires publishers to expand the size of the editorial teams, provide extensive education/training for staff on the detection and management of these issues, adopt automated integrity tools, or some combination thereof. As publishers consider how to incorporate technical solutions, they either need to individually seek out external services across disparate systems or build their own technologies – which can be time-consuming, expensive, and outside the scope of their expertise.  

To better support publishers that leverage Editorial Manager® (EM) and ProduXion Manager® (PM), the leading peer review and production tracking systems, Aries Systems offers a diverse ecosystem of best-in-class tools designed to enhance workflow and/or published research. Comprised of both in-house and third-party solutions, the Aries ecosystem delivers a ready-to-use network of features structured in a convenient “plug and play” framework connecting EM and PM users with the right technologies directly within workflow. The Aries ecosystem is one of the two main channels in the Aries Partner Program and allows publishers to expand their capabilities, strengthen operations, and innovate with confidence without the cost, risk, and complexity of building their own platform or managing external vendor relationships. 

As part of our ongoing commitment to supporting trust in research and protecting the scholarly record, Aries has driven strategic focus on delivering innovative research integrity solutions within the Manuscript Analysis branch of our ecosystem. For years, we have offered services dedicated to researcher verification, plagiarism, reference validation, and reproducibility. These include SciCrunch’s SciScore, Similarity Check powered by Crossref’s iThenticate, and Aries’ Identity Confidence Check.

In addition to these robust legacy tools, we have expanded our suite of integrity services in the past year to include powerful, AI-based solutions for more advanced support against the sophisticated challenges of this increasingly complex digital age. CACTUS’ Paperpal Preflight for Editorial Desk, Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm, DataSeer SnapShot, and Signals Manuscript Checks are some of the latest additions to the Aries ecosystem. Each offer an automatic analysis of incoming submissions in EM to streamline the screening process for editorial teams, detect concerns, and deliver recommendations or corrections to the publisher (and potentially, the Author) through detailed data reports accessible in the system. Catching and managing potentially problematic submissions early in the editorial workflow not only saves time and resources, but also helps safeguard against unsuitable publications. As we continually expand and adapt our ecosystem to the changing needs in the scholarly landscape, Aries is proactively exploring additional partnerships and technologies to strengthen this branch of the ecosystem to best serve our clients.  

To learn more about our offerings, please browse the various tools available across the different branches of our interactive ecosystem on the Aries website. To take advantage of the diverse applications for your publishing workflows, contact your Aries Account Coordinator (AC). Aries Systems is a proud sponsor of the 2025 ALPSP Conference and Awards. 

 

About the Author

As Marketing Manager at Aries Systems, Aimee DesRoches supports go-to-market initiatives and events to promote their robust publishing workflow solutions. Aimee leads partner marketing strategies and relationships to drive lasting value through industry collaboration to publishers and researchers worldwide. With over a decade of experience, Aimee is passionate about communications, partner, and content marketing to strengthen connections between communities and brands.