Queueing

Problem: Building a team of reviewers for a paper. Some of these reviewers may have specialty knowledge, e.g. in statistics, while some may have general knowledge about the subject of the paper.

Immediate solution (PLOS Biology): We have a user interface that allows editors to manually manage a number of queues. All invitations by default go into the "default" queue. Editors can also specify some invitations as "alternates" to another invitation, e.g. for people with specialty knowledge of statistics.

Editors will manually manage adding invitees to queues, sending invitations, and canceling invitations for unresponsive invitees as well as canceling invitations when a team has been filled.

Medium term: Automated queue processing, including sending invitations, canceling old invitations, canceling pending invitations when a team is complete.

Long term: Automated adding of reviewers to queues from a pool based on comparison of paper topic to reviewer expertise, automated reordering of queues based on availability, current workload, etc.

Below is a diagram of the possible states of an invitation and a flow diagram for queue processing.