SAGE has begun to know BPG since Catherine Rossbach (Executive Publisher, Business Development, SAGE Publishing) and Kim Mitchell (Director, Open Access Journals, SAGE Publishing) visited BPG U.S. office on July 12, 2017, and BPG applied for an award of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers for its F6Publishing system, which attracted the interest of John Shaw, a judge for the award. SAGE's such visit was mainly to communicate with the BPG team to understand the BPG’s publication process and the functions of the F6Publishing system.

Figure 1 A photo taken in BPG U.S. office. From left to right in this photo are Kim Mitchell, Catherine Rossbach, Li Ma, and Lian-Sheng Ma.

This workshop was held in BPG Beijing office (Figure 2). The BPG staff responsible for reception of SAGE guests included Jin-Lei Wang (Vice General Manager, Editorial Director), Yuan Qi (Vice Editorial Director), Fang-Fang Ji (Editorial Director), Ze-Mao Gong (Vice Editorial Director), Ya-Juan Ma (Editorial Director), Jin-Li Yan (Science Editor), Xiang Li (Assistant Editor), and Jia-Wei Li (Engineer). The workshop was chaired by Jin-Lei Wang (Vice General Manager, Editorial Director), and Fang-Fang Ji (editorial director) was responsible for taking minutes. After the arrival of the visitors, Jin-Lei Wang (Vice General Manager, Editorial Director) expressed his sincere welcome to the guests, and the members of both sides made brief introductions of themselves. Subsequently, Bob Howard introduced the history of SAGE, its development in recent years, and the purpose of their visit.

Figure 2 SAGE guests are communicating with BPG staff in Beijing office.

SAGE, founded in 1965 in the United States, is the world's leading independent academic and professional publishing group, and is the fifth largest academic publisher in the world. SAGE publishes over 1,000 journals and more than 800 books, and develops various databases every year. SAGE's publishing projects cover the fields of business, humanities, social sciences, science and technology, and medicine. In recent years, SAGE as a leading traditional academic publishing group, is also committed to the promotion of open access (OA) publishing, and it manages more than 170 kinds of high quality OA journals, including SAGE Open series.

Jin-Lei Wang (Vice General Manager, Editorial Director) introduced some information about BPG (https://www.wjgnet.com/bpg/about.htm) for the guests, which mainly included the BPG's development history, the basic information of the 43 journals published by BPG, the composition of language editors, the editorial board members, and the BPG's publishing business model. Taking an article published online as an example, Jin-Lei Wang introduced the online version of journals, and gave a detailed description of the contents in the left column of the article release page, which includes the comments on the article, CrossCheck results, documents related to academic rules and norms, and citations. Taking helpdesk as an example, Jin-Lei Wang showed the webpage display and the link to the F6Publishing system. SAGE visitors made detailed enquiries about what language editors did and who paid them, the contents of peer review report included in the comments on the article, the party to whom F6Publishing server is subordinate, and the standards of CrossCheck detection.

Xiang Li (Assistant Editor) gave a presentation entitled "Controlling academic misconduct at the stage of manuscript reception by assistant editor: Measures taken and effects" to discuss the academic misconduct examples exposed publicly, BPG’s manuscript publication process, the measures taken by BPG to control academic misconduct while receiving manuscripts, and the effects after taking these measures. SAGE visitors made detailed enquiries about the documents related to academic rules and norms that BPG requests authors to provide at the time of manuscript submission, the percentage of manuscripts whose authors gave up re-submission because of not being able to provide the above documents, and how BPG handled the manuscripts that were not returned on time.

John Shaw briefly communicated with Jia-Wei Li (engineer) about the intelligence of the F6Publishing system, including the selection of peer-reviewers and the automatic link of ORCID number with databases. Bob Howard also inquired the proportion of authors from China and the main way that the editorial office propagandized the journals. In response to these questions, Jin-Lei Wang (vice general manager, editorial director) introduced the country distribution of authors who submitted manuscripts and whose manuscripts were accepted, and told the guests that the company advertised the journals mainly through e-mails and academic conferences.

At last, SAGE guests thanked the BPG staff for preparing the materials and presentation, and took a photo with them (Figure 3).

Figure 3 SAGE visitors took a photo with BPG staff.