NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach)

NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach), published as NISO Recommended Practice RP-30, is a technical protocol and package format specifying how manuscript files, associated metadata, and peer review history can be transferred automatically, in a machine-readable way, between different journals' and publishers' manuscript submission systems. A file transfer counts as MECA-compliant only if it (1) packages the manuscript files, metadata, and any transferred reviewer reports into the structured format the recommended practice defines, and (2) moves that package between systems through an automated, standardized transfer mechanism rather than a person manually re-uploading files and re-typing review comments into a second system.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A journal's editor issues a 'reject with transfer offer' decision and the author consents; the manuscript files, submission metadata, and the completed reviewer reports are packaged in MECA format and moved automatically into the receiving sister journal's submission system, so the receiving editor sees the same manuscript and review record without the author re-uploading anything.

Is an instance

A preprint server and a journal's submission system both support MECA, so when an author clicks 'submit to journal' from the preprint page, the deposited manuscript files and metadata transfer directly into the journal's system as a MECA package instead of requiring a fresh manual upload.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A rejected author downloads the PDF reviewer comments from one journal's site and manually re-uploads them as a supplementary file when submitting to a different journal. No standardized package or system-to-system transfer occurred, so this is not a MECA transfer, even though the review content technically moved between journals.

Not an instance

Two journals from the same publisher share an internal database and simply query each other's records for a manuscript. Without packaging the content according to the RP-30 specification and moving it through a MECA-conformant transfer, this internal integration is not what the recommended practice defines, regardless of how automated it is.

NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach) is a NISO Recommended Practice, published as RP-30, that standardizes how manuscripts move electronically between different publishers’ and journals’ submission systems. Where cascading peer review describes the editorial policy of offering to carry a rejected manuscript and its completed reviews to another journal, MECA is the technical layer underneath that makes the actual file transfer work reliably: a defined package format and transfer protocol, rather than each publisher building its own bespoke, incompatible export/import process.

The problem MECA solves

Before a common transfer standard existed, moving a manuscript and its review history from one publisher’s system to another’s — even when both sides wanted the transfer to happen, as in a cascading or portable peer review arrangement — typically meant an editor or author manually downloading files and reviewer comments from one system and re-uploading them into another. That manual handoff is slow, error-prone, and loses structure: metadata has to be re-entered, file relationships (which revision, which supplementary file belongs to which reviewer report) can get scrambled, and reviewer reports risk being reformatted or partially lost in the process. NISO’s MECA working group developed the recommended practice specifically to remove that friction from manuscript transfer, whether the transfer is between two journals’ submission systems, from a preprint server into a submission system, from an authoring tool into a submission system, or from a submission system out to a downstream production or archiving service.

What the recommended practice actually specifies

RP-30 defines a package-based approach: a structured bundle (a manifest, the manuscript source and rendition files, and associated metadata in a specified XML format, plus reviewer reports and their metadata when reviews are part of the transfer) that a sending system assembles and a receiving system can parse without custom, one-off integration work for every publisher pair. Because both the package contents and the transfer mechanism are specified, any two systems that implement MECA can, in principle, exchange manuscripts with each other without a bespoke point-to-point integration — the same interoperability logic behind other NISO recommended practices for scholarly communication infrastructure.

The current version, RP-30-2023 (versioned 2.0.1), updates the original RP-30-2020 recommended practice that NISO’s MECA working group first published in July 2020.

How MECA relates to cascading and portable peer review

It is worth keeping the editorial policy and the technical protocol distinct, since they are frequently discussed together:

Cascading peer review is the editorial decision — a journal’s choice to offer transferring a rejected manuscript, along with its reviews, to another journal rather than treating rejection as a dead end.
MECA is the transfer mechanism — the standardized package format and protocol that makes carrying out that transfer technically straightforward and consistent, instead of an ad hoc manual export/import specific to whichever two systems are involved.

A publisher can run a cascading peer review program without using MECA (by handling transfers manually), and a system can implement MECA without a cascading review policy attached (for example, using it purely for preprint-to-journal submission transfer). In practice, though, MECA is the infrastructure that made large-scale, portfolio-wide cascading and portable peer review programs practical to run without a proportional increase in manual editorial-office labor for every transferred manuscript.

Where MECA is used

NISO documents several transfer scenarios the recommended practice covers beyond journal-to-journal cascading: transferring a manuscript and its metadata from a preprint server into a journal’s submission system when an author elects to submit from a preprint; transferring from an authoring or writing tool directly into a submission system; and transferring an accepted manuscript’s files and metadata from a submission system to a downstream production, typesetting, or archiving service. The common thread across all of these is the same one: avoid manual, error-prone re-entry of manuscript files and metadata every time a manuscript needs to move from one system to another in the publishing workflow.

Frequently asked questions

Is MECA a file format?

Not exactly. MECA specifies a package — a manifest plus a defined set of file types and an XML metadata schema — and a transfer protocol for moving that package between systems. It builds on existing file and metadata conventions rather than inventing a new manuscript file format from scratch.

Who maintains MECA?

MECA is developed and maintained by a NISO working group under the NISO recommended-practice process, the same standards body responsible for other scholarly-communication interoperability standards. The current published version is RP-30-2023.

Does using MECA require a publisher to adopt cascading peer review?

No. MECA is a transfer protocol that can be used for any of the manuscript-transfer scenarios it covers — journal-to-journal, preprint-to-journal, authoring-tool-to-submission-system, or submission-system-to-production-service — independently of whether a publisher runs a cascading peer review editorial policy.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/niso-meca-manuscript-exchange-common-approach" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

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