For society journals
A society journal, published by the people who edit it
Most learned-society journals are run by two or three people, at least one of whom is a working academic doing it alongside a day job. There is no production department. The money that would pay for one is the money the society would rather spend on its members.
So typesetting goes out, and the issue is late because the vendor is busy, and the structured files arrive weeks after publication, and nobody has the time to check them. None of that is a failure of effort. It is what happens when the work of production needs a specialist and you cannot employ one.
The difference
What changes
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The issue closes when you are ready, not when a vendor is
An accepted paper becomes a typeset galley in the session you sit down to it. Nothing is queued behind another publisher’s work.
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One person can do the whole job
Uploading, checking the structure, approving and publishing are four steps an editor performs. There is no stage that has to wait for somebody with different software.
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Your journal keeps its own look
The page design, the typeface, the licence sentence, the society’s logo and the publisher’s: all set once, for your journal, and applied to every article after it.
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The structured files stop being an afterthought
The XML and the deposit come out with the PDF, from the same approved article, so indexing happens on publication day.
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Authors see a real proof
A private link to the typeset article, which is what an author actually wants to check - not a manuscript with tracked changes.
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Volunteers can be given exactly what they need
An editor can be allowed to produce articles without being able to change the journal’s settings or see the account, so handing the role on is safe.
Fair questions
The reasonable objections
- “Our journal has to look the way it has always looked.”
- It should. Your page design is a specification and it is set up once, as a specification - margins, columns, typeface, heading sizes, running heads, the licence line and both logos. An article set here should be indistinguishable from one set by your previous typesetter.
- “Our editor is not technical.”
- The four steps are upload, read, correct, approve. Correcting a heading or an author’s affiliation is editing a document, which is work an editor already does. Nothing asks anyone to write or read a file format.
- “We publish unusual articles.”
- Everything the software decided can be overridden, so an article with an odd structure is corrected rather than rejected. The common awkward cases - appendices, long tables, supplementary files, articles with fifty authors - are ordinary here.
- “We cannot risk our unpublished papers.”
- Your journals and manuscripts are kept apart from every other publisher’s, two-factor sign-in can be required for your whole team, and every action is recorded.
Read next
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Journal typesetting software
What journal typesetting software has to do, what to look for when choosing it, and how an editor produces a print-ready galley without a typesetter.
Read this -
JATS XML conversion
How a Word manuscript becomes valid JATS XML your indexes will accept - what the standard asks for, and what goes wrong when XML is made by hand.
Read this -
File formats
Every file produced from one manuscript: a typeset PDF, online HTML, an editable Word copy, EPUB, JATS XML and the Crossref, DOAJ and PubMed deposits.
Read this
Next step
Try it on your next accepted paper.
Tell us about the journal and send your next accepted paper. We set the account up to your specification and you take that paper from upload to galley. If it does not look like your journal, you have lost an email.
