ProofCheck – Setting the standard in author proof correction

Published by Kaveh on

As Apple executives say, “we are really, really excited” to share something with you.

For quite a while we have been working on replacing the traditional method of sending PDFs to authors, and receiving annotations. We believe there should be only one “format of record“, namely the XML. So we wanted to allow authors to make changes to the XML proof of their paper directly, and we mean directly – not to an HTML file that is then converted to the “underlying” XML.

We are now proud to announce that after several months of hard work, we think we have a product that is simply the best, making proof correction and checking a true pleasure! Here are some highlights…

When the author clicks on a deep link in an email, the XML (saved according to the publisher specifications, e.g. JATS) show up in real time, just as a normal web page. (There is no intermediate HTML file, folks.) Clicking on the text highlights a  chunk of text, e.g. a paragraph, which becomes fully editable. Clicking outside the “chunk” results in the whole XML being immediately resaved to disk. So the XML is always “live”.

01

(Sample text taken from a PeerJ article: https://peerj.com/articles/272/)

Author change show up in easy to read colors and can be accepted or rejected by the desk editor:

Screen Shot 2014-09-14 at 21.58.41

(Sample text taken from a PeerJ article: https://peerj.com/articles/276/)

There is even an option to include VeRify, our false-color XML checking system, so that authors and desk editors can quickly confirm the structure of the XML:

Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 13.54.24

(Sample text taken from a CUP article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/fms.2014.4 under CCBY license)

Here are some more features:

  • Supports any flavor of XML, e.g. JATS, NLM, etc.
  • Math saved as MathML and beautifully rendered in MathJax
  • Rule-based and ad hoc “locking” of any parts of the manuscript, so allowing author to modify only what is required;
  • Convenient and threaded author queries and replies;
  • Outline view of manuscript, allowing only selected areas to be visible;
  • Accordion style list of changes and those accepted and rejected;
  • Full version control;
  • One-click insertion of references using DOIs, or references managers such as Zotero;
  • Automated, on-the-fly generation of a watermarked proof PDF at any stage, available to author or desk editor;
  • Optional generation of final PDF, Epub, etc, by desk editor, via AutoPublisher.

ProofCheck will be offered to River Valley’s clients in November 2014.

And just to whet your appetite, there is plenty more to come from our Labs, including full online authoring (RVRite) in Q1 of 2015. Imagine combining RVRite, ProofCheck, and AutoPublisher, and you have a near-instant publishing system. And stay tuned to read about what we have in store for those Word files too. How about publishing in 24 hours?

Did we say we’re really, really excited?