Journal Services
Techset offers the following journal services:
- Copyediting
- Art evaluation, clean-up, sizing, re-labelling and redrawing
- Composition of any complexity of text design or any complexity of content
- XML delivery
- Full service ‘Total Concept’ project management
‘Total Concept’ Journal Project Management
Techset Composition has been providing journal project management for over eighteen years. During this time our journal production teams have handled hundreds of journal issues and provided a trustworthy, reliable and valuable outsourcing service to journal publishers in the USA, UK and Europe.
Techset has extensive knowledge of all areas of journal production: copyediting, proof distribution, proof collation, issue compilation, dealing directly with authors and author queries, direct journal editor contact, scheduling, page budgets and creation of volume contents and indexes. Occasionally we have also been asked to handle the print process and have been responsible for handling print orders, paid and unpaid adverts, authors' offprints, subscriber labels, and progress chasing issues to dispatch of subscriber copies and delivery of the remainder to the warehouse.
When providing total concept project management, using the author contact details from the article metadata, an automated ‘first contact’ letter is sent to the corresponding author to let her or him know that their article is in production and when to expect proofs and author queries, and what to do with them. This primes the author and helps avoid the late return of proofs.
The specific functions we undertake are:
- Download accepted manuscripts from a publisher's FTP site or content management system (CMS). Do a full manuscript audit, entering details such as type of article, number of folios, number and type of illustrations, missing or incomplete material or illustrations, and author contact details into either the publisher's database/CMS or Techset's own CMS (TetraFE), accessible to the customer via our website, and searchable by manuscript number, DOI number, author, title, or volume and issue.
TetraFE is xml based and can be configured to interface with most CMSs so that article metadata, can be automatically captured and freely transferred back and forth during the various stages of an article’s workflow, allowing the author contact details to act as the trigger for our automated electronic proof distribution system.
- Copyedit using copyeditors qualified in the subject of the journal.
- Produce author queries that are either resolved with the author before composition, or distributed as a list with the author's page proofs and with proof marks showing where they occur in the text.
- Size illustrations and ensure labelling is consistent with the text.
- Distribute proofs electronically either as email attachments or by uploading to an FTP site or, occasionally as paper proofs dispatched by mail/courier.
- Ensure that publisher's covering letter, offprint order forms and any other required material is dispatched with the proofs.
- Proof correction collating, e.g. collating corrections from article author, publisher and freelance proof reader and resolving conflicting corrections.
- Issue compilation according to publisher's or editor's overall guidelines including update or creation of contents pages and other special prelim pages.
- Handling paid and unpaid adverts including checking that they meet publisher’s and printer’s requirements.
- Updating covers, including front cover illustration if changed between issues.
- Direct author liaison.
- Direct journal editor liaison.
- Prepare publishing statistics for editorial board meetings, such as average publication times.
- Produce end of volume indexes and volume contents.