Why did IEEE trans journals begin to abandon the ScholarOne submission system?

The IEEE's transition away from the ScholarOne submission system for its *Transactions* journals is a strategic consolidation driven by the need for greater operational efficiency, enhanced author experience, and deeper data integration across its vast publishing portfolio. The primary mechanism for this shift is the adoption of a unified, institutionally-owned platform, which in practice has largely been the IEEE Author Portal, built upon the Editorial Manager platform from Aries Systems Corporation. This move represents a deliberate effort to move away from a fragmented ecosystem where different journal families or even individual titles operated on disparate systems, creating administrative overhead, inconsistent user interfaces, and siloed data. The decision is not a reflection of a fundamental failure of ScholarOne, which remains a robust and widely used scholarly submission system, but rather a calculated choice by IEEE to bring a critical operational function in-house under a single, standardized technological umbrella. The core impetus is centralized control, aiming to streamline workflows for editors, reviewers, and authors while enabling IEEE to directly manage and analyze the entire submission pipeline from a single point of data aggregation.

The specific advantages of this consolidation are multifaceted. Operationally, it reduces complexity and cost associated with maintaining multiple system licenses and training staff on different interfaces. For authors and volunteers, a single sign-on and a consistent submission experience across all IEEE journals significantly lowers the cognitive and procedural burden, particularly for those who engage with multiple publications. More profoundly, a unified platform allows IEEE to implement global policy changes, reporting standards, and ethical screening tools uniformly and instantaneously. It facilitates powerful cross-journal analytics, providing insights into submission trends, review timelines, and geographic participation that were more difficult to synthesize when data resided in separate ScholarOne instances. This integrated data environment is crucial for strategic decision-making and for developing new author services. Furthermore, direct ownership of the platform infrastructure offers greater flexibility for future innovation and integration with other IEEE digital systems, such as IEEE Xplore or membership services, creating a more cohesive ecosystem for the research community.

The implications of this transition are significant for all stakeholders. Authors benefit from a standardized process, but may experience transitional challenges as workflows are adjusted. For editors and editorial staff, the change necessitates retraining but promises long-term efficiency gains through unified reporting and communication tools. From a competitive standpoint, this move aligns with a broader trend among large publishers to develop or adopt comprehensive end-to-end publishing workflows that extend beyond peer review management. It positions IEEE to better compete with commercial publishers who leverage such integrated systems for speed and service. The abandonment of ScholarOne is therefore a targeted, infrastructure-level upgrade. It is a proactive institutional investment aimed at reducing fragmentation, harnessing data, and future-proofing the publication process for the world's largest technical professional organization, ensuring its publishing operations remain scalable, efficient, and author-centric in an increasingly competitive landscape.