For university presses
A dozen journals, one small team, no workflow per title
A university press or a library publishing programme is usually a handful of staff responsible for a list: a dozen journals, maybe more, each with its own editorial board, its own design, its own licence, its own citation style and its own idea of how a running head should read.
The cost is rarely any single journal. It is that every journal is slightly different, so nothing is routine, and the knowledge of how each one is produced lives in one person’s head and leaves when they do.
At this scale
What a list of titles needs
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Each journal’s design held as a specification
Page size, columns, typeface, heading scale, running heads, the licence sentence and the logos are recorded per journal and applied to every article. Nobody has to remember how this title is set.
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One way of working across the whole list
Upload, check, approve, publish - the same four steps for every journal, so a new member of staff learns the process once rather than twelve times.
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Imprint details that cannot be got wrong
Each journal’s licence, copyright line, ISSNs and DOI prefix are set once and printed from that record, so an article cannot go out with another title’s licence on it.
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Roles that match how a press is staffed
A production editor can produce articles without being able to change a journal’s identity or the account; an administrator can do both. Casual and student staff can be given the first without the second.
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Every action on the record
Who uploaded what, who approved it, who published it, and when. A press answerable to a university needs to be able to show this, not remember it.
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Connectable to what you already run
If you have a submission system, it can hand over an accepted manuscript and collect the finished files, so the list is not two systems that disagree.
The archive
And the back catalogue
Most presses are carrying decades of issues that were published before structured files were expected: findable by a reader who already knows they are there, and invisible to everybody else. Wherever you still hold the manuscript as a word-processor file, those articles can go through the same four steps and come out with the XML and the deposits that register their DOIs and make them findable - so the archive is held to the same standard as this month’s issue.
It is the same four steps, on older material. The usual approach is a title at a time, starting with whichever one gets asked for most. Reading an article back out of a published PDF is not something it does yet, so an issue that survives only as print output is not a job for this today.
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
Start with one title.
Start with one title. Send us its specification and a recent issue; we set that journal up and you put the issue through. That tells you what the other eleven would take.
