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Ros Letellier, Marketing Communications Manager, Atypon Systems
Have you ever wondered what happens to an article to get it from a researcher's desk to your desktop? The journey of Article A below describes a typical process, and while every publisher has its own way of working, this should give you a good idea of what goes on behind the scenes.
The editors of Journal X have received an article, Article A, which they feel has promise. They send it out for peer review - for scrutiny by other experts in the same field. The reviewers agree that Article A is of a high enough standard for acceptance subject to a certain amount of revision, and the editors convey the reviewer feedback to the author along with a conditional acceptance. The author will make these changes and resubmit, although as the review process is extremely rigorous Article A may need several stages of revision before it can be formally accepted for publication.
Once accepted for publication, Article A moves out of the editorial office and into the publisher's production workflow. It is sent to the typesetter, where it undergoes conversion to XML, the code which sits behind the HTML version. The publisher chooses to make available an HTML and a PDF version of the paper. The PDF of the article will provide the fidelity to print, reference linking, as well as publisher and library branding, and is the preferred format for users to print and read offline. The HTML version is usually quicker to download, and allows the publisher to offer content enhancements only available online, for example the ability to zoom in on figures, or highlighting of search terms within the text, making it easier for readers to carry out a quick scan of the article for evaluation.
Article A is now ready to be uploaded to the production area of the publisher's website, where it is parsed for generic errors and validated against the correct document type definition (DTD) - the commands which control the order and attributes of different elements of the electronic article. The typesetter then checks the submissions area of the site to make sure there are no reported errors such as an incorrect filename or DOI. If all is well, they will let the publisher know that the article is ready for quality assurance checks - literally, eyeball checks of the article in a staging area where it can be seen exactly as it would appear on the live site. If these checks reveal any errors, these will be reported back to the typesetter and new files provided. Once the article gets the green light, it will be 'pushed live' onto the website.
If Article A has been allocated to an issue it will have been processed alongside all of the other articles appearing in it, and they will be published simultaneously as a full issue. A 'table of contents' and/or 'search' alert (via email or RSS feed) is then automatically generated by the e-publishing platform and sent out to all of the registered recipients to flag its availability. Journal X, however, has a back-log of articles to get through, and Article A may have to wait a number of weeks before it will be placed in an issue.
Once this might have kept the article away from its audience for a frustratingly long period of time, but happily Journal X now offers an 'online early' facility so that accepted articles can be made available to their readership immediately. An 'online early' alert is triggered automatically by the admin tool in the same way it would be if a new issue had been published. The online article appears in the content listings in the same way as any other, and can be found by searching or browsing in the usual way. A unique digital object identifier (DOI) allows it to be cited before it is allocated to an issue, while also ensuring it can still be found easily once it has been moved from the 'online early' section to its permanent resting place.
Metadata for Article A, including its DOI will be sent to reference databases to enable reference lookup, so that if and when the article is cited, the correct information is available to dynamically feed reference links within the citing article. If the location of Article A changes (for example when it is moved into a numbered volume and issue, or if the journal decides to switch publisher) new information is sent to the reference databases to ensure that citation links are up-to-date.
To maximise discoverability, the publisher distributes the metadata for Article A and/or issue to all the relevant A & I services, bibliographic databases, search engines, link server vendors, community sites etc. Plus, as the research in Article A is considered by Journal X to be particularly interesting and important, the publisher does some additional marketing around it - sending out a press release and special email campaign, and making it as visible as possible on their site.
Article A receives hundreds of downloads in its first few months and though this slowly begins to tail off it will continue to receive a few downloads each month. A year from now, the publisher will include it in a collection of articles on a similar topic, and the promotion of this will see a new flurry of downloads. When the embargo on it has passed - a year or two from original publication - it may also appear on full-text aggregator sites such as JSTOR, and low-cost or free aggregator databases for the developing world such as Hinari, AGORA or INASP.
Although Article A may eventually become out-dated and other articles will appear to supersede it, it will remain available online in perpetuity for anyone who wants to access it. Indeed, thanks to initiatives such as Portico and LOCKSS, Article A will still be available in hundreds of years and accessible from any point on the planet.
With technology making it so supremely easy to find and access electronic content, you may never have had cause to wonder how that content gets online, or if you've thought about it at all, may not have imagined it would be any more complicated than attaching a file to an email, or uploading a photograph to a social networking site. However, this article has hopefully gone some way to showing the work that goes on behind the scenes to give end-users instant access to content as well as a whole host of contingent features that enhance discoverability and usability.
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