Chemistry Central Blog

A view from the inside: post-acceptance and publication

Last week I talked about the pre-acceptance stage. Once a manuscript has passed through the pre-acceptance stage and is accepted, then a provisional PDF of the manuscript is published by Chemistry Central Journal. The content of the provisional PDF is the formatted version of the manuscript that the reviewers and the author have agreed upon during peer review.

Post-acceptance
Once accepted, the final version of the manuscript is then sent to an outside company, which formats the manuscript into XML. XML (Extensible Markup Language), is a markup language much like HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), but was designed to describe and structure data, unlike HTML which was designed to present data on a webpage. XML is not a replacement for HTML, but rather an addition that allows for more information to be stored and organized.

XML tags are used to link different references in the text. For example, XML tags link sources cited in the text with the appropriate references; tables and figures are linked in the same manner. These tags make searches for specific authors or subjects easier and more effective, because XML organizes data so that search engines can find the right information. For example from the advanced search on Chemistry Central Journal, it is possible to restrict a search to the title, authors or any other part of the article.

After the manuscript has been formatted into XML, the production team validates the XML to ensure everything has been correctly tagged and formatted. The manuscript is then sent back to the editorial team for one last check, and then the author has one week to look over the final version. After the author approves the manuscript, Chemistry Central Journal publishes the final version as both a PDF and a full-text webpage.

Timeframes
In theory, the whole publication process takes approximately twelve weeks. Our editorial team strives to provide the author with an initial decision after six weeks from the time of submission. This time is highly variable, however being dependent on the responsiveness of authors and reviewers. The formatting carried out by the editorial production team in the pre-acceptance stage usually takes three weeks, dependent partly on the responsiveness of the author and also on the number of rounds of revision. The final checks and production of the final version of the manuscript last another three weeks. So after only three months, an article can go from being submitted to being published in its final version in Chemistry Central Journal.

DOIs
Upon publication, every article is assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which is like a bar code for objects of intellectual property on the Internet. The DOI of an article remains the same regardless of how the URL changes over time and can be used to locate the abstract or the full-text of a published article by resolving the DOI of that article. We register the DOI, along with the article’s information and URL, with CrossRef. That way, if we ever change the URL for an article, we send the new URL to CrossRef and they will update that DOI’s information. DOI’s can also be used directly as links. This article <http://www.journal.chemistrycentral.com/content/1/1/10>
has a DOI: 10.1186/1752-153X-1-10. This article can also be reached using <http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1752-153X-1-10>
and this link will always work, even if the URL above changes.

Post-publication
All of our articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This license also encourages archiving of full-text articles in institutional repositories and full-text hosts, such as PubMed Central. Digital repositories have the advantage of giving articles a wider distribution, because they are indexed by search engines, such as Google Scholar, Scirus, Scopus, PubMed, DOAJ, etc., increasing the likelihood that others will be able to find your research. Digital repositories also safeguard articles and ensure their long-term preservation. Chemistry Central deposits all open access articles in multiple digital archives around the world, including INIST, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Potsdam University, PubMed Central, and UK PubMed Central. Institutional repositories are also important in enabling a research institution to have access to its own research. BioMed Central operates a repository hosting service called Open Repository, which lowers the cost to institutes of setting-up and running their own repository.

The main advantage of open access publishing is its visibility and accessibility. The full text of published articles is immediately available online in multiple databases. For example the following article was recently published in Chemistry Central Journal:

Research article      
Enantioselective transacetylation of (R,S)-β-citronellol by propanol rinsed immobilized Rhizomucor miehei lipase
Abir B Majumder, Shweta Shah, Munishwar N Gupta
Chemistry Central Journal 2007, 1:10 (18 April 2007)

A quick search on Google for “enantioselective transacetylation” yielded full-text entries of this article from Chemistry Central, PubMed Central, and the authors’ own institutional repository.

Farewell
This will be my last blog post, as my time as an intern at Chemistry Central is coming to an end. It has been an exciting and insightful time for me. I have learned all about the publishing process for an online scientific, open access journal, which has helped me understand how important open access to information is for the continuation scientific research. I hope to continue using and benefiting from open access research in the future.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 11:33    Comments (0)