7.50 - Assignments strategies

01/09/2026

Automatic assignment strategies

The automatic assignment feature has received a long-awaited makeover! The old configuration settings (article type/section/topical) have been discarded to make room for a dedicated page:

After a first submission or technical check, Nestor will check and apply the strategies defined here. The goal is to quickly dispatch articles to relevant editors based on the article metadata, thus saving many clicks to Editorial Offices. The dispatch criteria can be any standard or custom field.

Stragegies are sorted by priority, with upper strategies having priority on the others. As soon as a criteria is met, the strategy is applied, and lower strategies will be ignored.

For example in the screenshot above, a paper with:

no topical issue

in section "3. Cosmology"

and which is a regular paper

will match the second strategy and be dispatched to Pascale and Thierry.

Strategies and filiation links

For a given strategy, multiple editors can be assigned on the fly:

This is extremely useful to assign several affiliated editors to handle e.g. a special issue:

Editor-in-Chief > Associate Editor > Guest Editor (who is current)

In that example, the Guest-Editor will be responsible for handling the peer review, and his decision proposal can be subject to validation by his immediate parent (here, the Associate Editor).

New action: skip assignment

The technical check sometimes lead to EICs being stuck at the assignment step. This new action will unlock the situation:

Profile configuration: visibility of other profiles

Configuration of EIC/EO profiles has been made easier thanks to the implementation of this new column: