Friends,
Is anyone aware of a standard length of time that editors should retain files on manuscripts that have been published or rejected?

Thank you for your insight,

Scott L. Tomar
Associate Professor, U. Florida College of Dentistry

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We keep our rejected files for one year after the date of rejection; we keep our accepted files two years after the date of acceptance. If authors haven't sent a revision in 2 years after we gave them a Revise decision, we toss the file.

Alice Landwehr
Managing Editor, The Journal of Pediatrics

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Any thoughts about how the Era of Online Submission will alter our procedures?

Rich Rothenberg
Annals of Epidemiology

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Rich, you are right; I did not mention that we are currently using an online submission and review procedure. However, it is best practice for our office to keep paper files the same way we've always done, for many reasons that I won't go into unless requested, therefore, our procedure for purging files will remain the same.

The really nice feature with the online submission and review system is that when we get an author who submits a revision after we've purged the file (>2 years after the Revise decision), we can easily reconstruct the file and will only be missing, for example, handwritten notes.

Alice Landwehr
Managing Editor, The Journal of Pediatrics

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Our policy:
Accepted: 6 months,
Rejected: 2 years

Arash Etemadi
Managing Editor, International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism

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We keep both rejected and accepted manuscripts for one year after the date of rejection or acceptance. However, in case of accepted manuscript, after one year we notify the author to send us the revised manuscript within one month otherwise it will regarded as having been withdrawn and any revised version received subsequently will be treated as a new paper.

Mohsen Abolhassani
Editor, Iranian Biomedical Journal (IBJ)

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Since we manage all manuscripts electronically now, we keep everything forever. Disk space is cheap.

William M. Tierney
Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of General Internal Medicine
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