Nature Chemistry | The Sceptical Chymist

Journal journeys: Day 189, Paper trail

For those of you who haven’t noticed, Nature Chemistry is now open for business – our online submission system is up and running…

Such a small sentence, but it is the culmination of a huge effort by a large number of people.

Online submission systems don’t just build themselves, it takes a number of talented individuals to make sure that they are compiled correctly and run smoothly. Many test manuscripts passed through an imaginary peer-review process and were evaluated – not particularly thoroughly – by the likes of Dr Green, Professor Black and Mr Brown. Inboxes were flooded with large numbers of e-mails to make sure the correct message was dispatched under the appropriate circumstances. After all, you don’t want to accept a manuscript when all you actually are trying to do is send someone a message confirming their submission… try getting out of that one!

To coincide with the online submission system going live, we needed to put together a guide to authors. To put together such a document, we needed to sit down as a team and decide what we actually wanted to put in it. What article types do we want? How do we want them submitted? And so on… In addition to the editorial concerns, our production department also cast their eye over the GTA to make sure their requirements were met and then the whole document was copy-edited. If we’re telling you not to make mistakes when compiling your paper, it would be embarrassing if we had mistakes or inconsistencies in the GTA.

That’s still not all though. Web production had to put the GTA on our website and that also involves tweaking the navigation on the site and making sure that all other related sites at NPG now point to the right place. Marketing needed to know when we were going live so that they can get the message out to the wider chemical community and so on….

And so, the manuscripts are starting to arrive – so I probably shouldn’t spend too much time blogging today, I need to go and look up some references. (Although I plan to put up a post in the near future about the choices we made concerning article types).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Comments

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    Masa said:

    Congratulations on the submission system going live!

    I hope you get many high quality papers!