Academic Publishing - Publishing Process

Publishing Process

The process of academic publishing is divided into two distinct phases. The process of peer review is organized by the journal editor and is complete when the content of the article, together with any associated images or figures, are accepted for publication. The peer review process is increasingly managed online, through the use of proprietary systems, commercial software packages (e.g. ScholarOne Manuscripts, Aries Editorial Manager, EJournalPress, and Scholastica), or open source and free software (e.g. Open Journal Systems).

Once peer review has been completed, the original author(s) of the article will modify their submission in line with the reviewers' comments, and this is repeated until the editor is satisfied.

The production process, controlled by a production editor or publisher, then takes an article through copy editing, typesetting, inclusion in a specific issue of a journal, and then printing and online publication. Copy editing seeks to ensure that an article conforms to the journal's house style, that all of the referencing and labelling is correct, and that there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Typesetting deals with the appearance of the article — layouts, fonts, headings etc., both for print and online publication. Historically, these activities were all carried out in-house in a publisher, but increasingly are subject to outsourcing. The majority of typesetting is probably now done in India and China, and copy editing is frequently done by local freelancers, or by staff at the typesetters in India or China. Even printing and distribution are now tending to move overseas to lower-cost areas of the world, such as Singapore.

In much of the 20th century, such articles were photographed for printing into proceedings and journals, and this stage were known as camera-ready copy. With modern digital submission in formats such as PDF, this photographing step is no longer necessary, though the term is still sometimes used.

The author will review and correct proofs at one or more stages in the production process. The proof correction cycle has historically been labour-intensive as handwritten comments by authors and editors are manually transcribed by a proof reader onto a clean version of the proof. In recent years, this process has been streamlined by the introduction of e-annotations in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and other programs, but it still remains a time-consuming and error-prone process.