The Development of an On-line Submission and Peer Review System

Online submission and peer review is emerging as the next step forward for many journal publishers in an ever increasing drive to take advantage of technological improvements in transferring data electronically over the internet. The Electronic Submission and PEer REview (ESPERE) project was initiated in 1996 as an electronic Libraries (eLib) initiative of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Subsequently the project continued as a self-funding group composed of a consortium of learned society and commercial journal publishers intent on utilising the changes in technology to improve the services they provide to their authors as well as cutting their costs and increasing efficiencies.

`Electronic Publishing' -- Practice and Experience

Electronic Publishing -- Origination, Dissemination and Design (EP-odd) is an academic journal which publishes refereed papers in the subject area of electronic publishing. The authors of the present paper are, respectively, editor-in-chief, system software consultant and senior production manager for the journal. EP-odd's policy is that editors, authors, referees and production staff will work closely together using electronic mail. Authors are also encouraged to originate their papers using one of the approved text-processing packages together with the appropriate set of macros which enforce the layout style for the journal. This same software will then be used by the publisher in the production phase. Our experiences with these strategies are presented, and two recently developed suites of software are described: one of these makes the macro sets available over electronic mail and the other automates the flow of papers through the refereeing process. The decision to produce EP-odd in this way means that the publisher has to adopt production procedures which differ markedly from those employed for a conventional journal.