A socio-technical perspective on web-based manuscript management and publishing: A two-year case study

This paper describes the design and implementation of Tiger, a web based manuscript management and publishing system. The system was designed to facilitate the fundamental process of selecting and publishing scholarly work: submission, reviewing, editing, and publishing of manuscripts. It can be used to manage electronic and paper journals as well as professional conferences, where peer reviewing is necessary. Tiger has been successfully used for the last two years for the processing of conference proposals for the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association. We offer an overview of the system as well as an analysis of the usage of the system. We report our observations of this process, focusing on the interactions between the different stake-holders: authors, reviewers, editors, developers. These different stake-holders have different problems and see the success of Tiger in different terms. We believe such “thick descriptions” of the contingent and socially constructed nature of technological innovations are essential for our getting a better understanding the design and implementation process.