ASSISTANT is an OJS-based system for journals online editing and publishing. Supports all main activities of editorial management, from creation of a journal page, over article submission, monitoring of the reviewing process, administering documentation, maintaining records, making editorial decisions, and publishing volumes on the journal's website.

In addition to the basic functions available in the original OJS platform, ASSISTANT incorporates some additional custom tools developed by the SCIndeks publisher. These additional functionalities aim to enhance the formal quality of submitted manuscripts and encourage reviewers to add new value to the articles.

CrossRef

CrossRef is an authorized agency responsible for administering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). A DOI is a unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to an electronic document on the web, ensuring persistent and unambiguous access.

CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation linking system based on DOIs. This system enables researchers to conveniently access the full-text of cited references on other publisher platforms by clicking on the reference citation within a publisher's platform.

ASSISTANT assigns DOIs to all papers published in a journal, ensuring their permanent accessibility. Through the CrossRef/DOI link, these articles are available for download and citation. One of the primary objectives of the system is to enhance the impact of ASSISTANT journals.

CrossCheck (iThenticate)

CrossCheck, powered by iThenticate, is a service provided by CrossRef to prevent plagiarism. It utilizes a unique text database for comprehensive similarity checks, making it the most reliable tool for detecting scientific plagiarism.

All papers published in ASSISTANT journals undergo routine plagiarism detection using CrossCheck. Subsequent verification of plagiarism and decisions regarding manuscript rejection are carried out by the journal editors themselves.

Mind the Trap

Mind the Trap is a custom tool developed by CEON/CEES that alerts authors to the presence of illegitimate references in their manuscripts. It processes the References section of the manuscript and visibly highlights references listed in its blacklist, including retracted/corrected papers and publications from fake, predatory, and suspected journals.

Authors retain the autonomy to decide whether to discard the checked references (along with any related text) or retain them in their manuscripts..

CiteMatcher

CiteMatcher is a tool dessigned to automatically verify the consistency between in-text citations and the reference list, ensuring accurate information and correcting errors and omissions. Following a trigger that a paper received positive review ("Accept Submission" or "Revisions Required"), CiteMatcher processes the article, locates citations in the text which are not given in the references list and vice versa, and displays them in a report. The effectiveness of CiteMatcher in detecting such errors depends on the authors' adherence to citation standards in both the text and the reference list. CiteMatcher identifies two types of errors:

1. In-text citations exist but are omitted from the reference list.
2. Reference list citations exist but are omitted in the article's main text.

RefFormatter

RefFormatter is designed to format references in accordance with the journal's adopted citation style. Following a positive review trigger, RefFormatter automatically processes (rearranges or completes) references cited by the authors in their submitted paper. This process relies on automatic matching of references with their original form as provided in reliable (normative) databases such as CrossRef and SCIndeks. References identified in these sources are parsed by RefFormatter into their constituent bibliographic elements (e.g., author, title, etc.) and formatted according to the selected citation style.

Reviewing Reviewers – Assessment of reviewers

This tool, integrated into SCIndeks Assistant, ensures standardized assessment of peer reviews at the editor's request. Editors evaluate the quality of reviews, while authors assess reviews in terms of their contributions to improving the submitted manuscripts. The tool quantifies and compiles results for all reviews and all reviewers, generating an annual report used by Editorial Boards for selecting the most suitable reviewer for a certain manuscript, and by SCIndeks publisher for recognizing and awarding outstanding reviewers.