7.50 - Editorial assignments

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 the strategies defined here and assign editors accordingly. The goal is to quickly dispatch articles to relevant editors based on the article metadata, thus saving many clicks to Editorial Offices. The criteria can be any standard or custom field.

Stragegies are sorted by priority, the upper strategies having priority on the others. As soon as a criteria is met, the strategy is applied, and other 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 validated by his immediate parent (here, the Associate Editor).