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APS Research Journals’ Time to Publication Dramatically Shortens in 2007 |
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If you have published an article in one of the
APS research journals in the second half of 2007, you may have noticed that
the time it took from acceptance of your manuscript to final publication was
much shorter than in the past. That is because the Publications Department
decreased that time from an average of four months to two and a half months.
A year of meetings and workflow changes put together by the Editorial, Editorial Art, and Peer Review Managers of the department (Mark Goodwin, Eric Pesanelli, and Gil Ebner), put Publications in a position to make a real change. With the help and guidance of APS’s printer/compositor, Cadmus, they were able to move to an article-based workflow that made the final difference in shortening the time. Every Journal Supervisor, Copy Editor, and Art Editor stepped up to the challenge and started working in this new workflow. The results have been dramatic. Perhaps without realizing it, authors have helped, too. APS has been encouraging authors to submit source files (the files used to create the document, i.e., the Word document for the text) during peer review, instead of the PDF version authors had gotten used to submitting. Having those source files upon acceptance of a manuscript has allowed us to move into production much sooner than before, when the Peer Review Department had to work hard in some cases to get the source files from the authors after acceptance, wasting precious days and even weeks. APS has published accepted manuscripts within a week of acceptance as Articles in PresS since 2003. Even after the launch of Articles in PresS, however, the time to final publication (printing and posting online in final edited, proofed, and typeset form) was becoming uncompetitive with other journals in related fields. “We saw the challenge and met it,” says Margaret Reich, Director of Publications. “It took a lot of flexibility and creativity, but it was well worth it to better serve our authors.”
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