An analytical study of the editorial and publishing policies of journals has made it possible to substantiate a group of qualitative criteria that determine the formal and content requirements for scientific manuscripts in the process of making decisions about their publication. Considering the standards that regulate publishing processes and bibliographic business allows identifying the main elements of the publishing design of articles and the editor-in-chief, editorial board and editorial team’s requirements for manuscripts. On the ground of the identified typical stages in selecting manuscripts for publication, an expert decision support system has been developed and implemented for a formalized assessment of the scientific article quality based on standardized peer review results. The proposed expert system makes it possible to reduce the reviewers’ subjectivity level due to the review process standardization and to select the best articles for publication in the journal on the example of the online electronic edition “Ergodesign”.