Table of Contents
- ASH-SAP Becomes the 1,500th Publication to Go Live with Editorial Manager
- The Biological Bulletin Selects Editorial Manager
- The Lancet Launches Online Peer Review System
- Aries Systems Releases Next Generation of Peer Review System
- Atypon Systems Inc. and Aries Systems Corporation Collaborate
- Editorial Manager Reaches, and Rapidly Surpasses 1,000 Live Journal Deployments
- Aries Systems Corporation Offers Free Copies of the ALPSP Report
- Editorial Manager User Group Meeting Judged a Major Success
- Alden Group and Aries Systems Link Up to Offer Start-to-Finish Manuscript Workflow
- Jennifer Fleet Joins Aries Systems' Management Team as the Director of Customer Services
- Aries Sees Accelerated Adoption of Online Peer Review with Editorial Manager
- Aries Systems Corporation Starts the Year with New Customers and a New Release of Editorial Manager
- Springer SBM Selects Editorial Manager for Enterprise Deployment
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ASH-SAP Becomes the 1,500th Publication to Go Live with Editorial Manager
December 20, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - The American Society of Hematology Self-Assessment Program (ASH-SAP) submission and peer review site became the 1,500th publication to go live with Editorial Manager.
ASH-SAP is the only complete, comprehensive educational resource available to professionals around the world who need to stay current with the latest advances in the rapidly evolving disciplines of adult and pediatric hematology. ASH Image Bank, another important educational resource, also relies on Editorial Manager.
This announcement comes exactly six months after Advances in Anatomical Pathology became the 1,000th live Editorial Manager site.
To visit the ASH-SAP site, click here.
The Biological Bulletin Selects Editorial Manager
Published since 1897 by the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, The Biological Bulletin is one of America’s oldest peer-reviewed scientific journals. The journal has selected Editorial Manager for online manuscript submission and peer review and plans to go live with the system in early 2006.
The Lancet Launches Online Peer Review System
November 1, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - the world's leading independent general medical journal – The Lancet – launched its first online manuscript submission and peer review system, powered by Editorial Manager.
The weekly journal has been published since 1823, and today features challenging editorials, signed commentaries, original research, commissioned reviews and an international news section which all cover important developments and discoveries in global medicine.
Click here to visit The Lancet submission site.
Aries Systems Releases Next Generation of Peer Review System
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October 14, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - Aries Systems Corporation, developer of the most widely deployed Web-based manuscript tracking and peer review system, today announced the release of Editorial Manager Version 4.0.
First-generation online peer review systems use the World Wide Web to automate simple, manual tasks such as distribution of manuscript copies, sending reviewer reminders and transfer of manuscripts to production systems. Users of enterprise-class peer review systems like Editorial Manager routinely benefit from these and other innovations resulting in dramatic process improvements. For example, since adopting Editorial Manager, Annals of Emergency Medicine has reduced average time from submission to first decision from 47 days to 14 days. Editorial Manager Version 4.0 goes beyond functional workflow improvements, to enhance the qualitative aspects of decision making by editors and reviewers:
- Author-submitted bibliographies are automatically validated and linked to external resources such as PubMed® and CrossRef. This means that reviewers and editors can more easily assess the quality of submissions and can conveniently “drill down” to full content sources cited in manuscripts.
- Bibliographies can be automatically formatted to a specific journal style for reviewer and editor convenience, and to optimize downstream production tasks.
- Journals can specify customized title, keyword and author name searches targeted at external databases such as Google(TM) Scholar, PubMed®, Scirus and other leading bibliographic databases. This helps editors and reviewers to more quickly assess the worth of a submission and to identify duplicate submissions or plagiarism.
- A single click in the user record initiates a database search to identify other articles authored by the user.
- Secure “deep links” mean that editors can initiate their assigned editorial tasks such as reviewer selection directly from email notifications generated by the system.
- Data mining reports help editors better evaluate past reviewer performance and obtain a snapshot view of ongoing peer review activities.
These and many other new features in Version 4.0 mean that Editorial Manager is now significantly ahead of firstgeneration peer review systems. Commenting on her experience with Editorial Manager, Sue Shock, Staff Editor at the journal Medicine said, “EM has definitely made my life easier! Aries anticipates and delivers features I’d like to see added – sometimes before I even think of them myself – such as automated reference checking and linking with eXtyles.” As with previous new releases of Editorial Manager, Version 4.0 is being rolled-out to journals on a phased basis and in a manner that does not require any journal down time or immediate staff retraining. Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Aries commented, “The train has left the station for this next generation of online peer review systems. Editorial Manager has been appropriately designed and engineered so that all users, journals and publishers can immediately take advantage of our latest technological innovations – we leave no users behind.”
Atypon Systems Inc. and Aries Systems Corporation Collaborate
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October 13, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - The Internet holds enormous potential to reduce the time that it takes for publishers to accept, process, and publish manuscripts online. However, many scholarly publishers have been unable to capitalize on this potential because of a lack of connectivity between disparate elements of the publication cycle.
Atypon and Aries Systems have formed a collaboration that will empower scholarly publishers, by offering a seamless connection between two mission critical elements of publication cycle: the online submission system and the e-publishing platform.
Aries Systems’ online peer review system, Editorial Manager, enables upload and peer review of author manuscripts on the Internet. Following final editorial acceptance, the manuscript can be “flagged” for early online publication and can be automatically transferred to the Atypon Literatum e-publishing platform for immediate delivery to readers. This means that within a matter of minutes an author’s accepted manuscript is publicly available, allowing early access to the underlying knowledge while a final version of the manuscripts undergoes traditional production processing such as page composition.
Lyndon Holmes, the President of Aries commented, “The widespread adoption of automated processing tools in Editorial Manager such as image checking and citation validation has resulted in significant increases in the quality of accepted manuscripts. When combined with branding enhancements such as the ability to inject a journal-defined cover page, an accepted manuscript on Literatum can provide much of the value traditionally only delivered in the final version of the manuscript.”
Georgios Papadopoulos, President of Atypon added, “Publishers value the Literatum e-publishing platform because it provides a robust and scaleable solution for both large organizations like Blackwell, with over 800 journals, and for the smaller publisher with only one journal. The ability to automatically post accepted manuscripts from Editorial Manager is further compelling evidence that Literatum is ‘tuned in’ to the requirements of Internet-savvy publishers and authors and is consistent with our strategy of supplying a complete publishing solution for our clients.”
Richard Wynne, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Aries, added, “Increasingly, authors want their manuscripts to appear online as soon as possible. This collaboration will enable us to keep pace with fast-changing author expectations.” The completely automated interface between Editorial Manager and Literatum is planned for release in early 2006.
About Atypon. Since 1996, Atypon has focused on providing software and services to the information industry. Atypon offers a suite of software and services for the information industry. Atypon has two electronic publishing services, Atypon Link (the former Extenza service) and Atypon Premium which together with other custom services provide services to over 60 publishers. These clients include major websites such as Blackwell-Synergy, Annual Reviews, and CrossRef as well as mid-sized commercial and not-for profit publishers. Atypon Link provides a fully managed low-cost e-publishing solution to a growing group of international publishers including Walter de Gruyter, the American Marketing Association, and Thomas Telford. Other Atypon services include PDFplus, which dynamically adds links to PDFs, and LINKplus, a full service linking solution for publishers.
The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California with offices in New York and Oxford. For more information on Atypon, please visit www.atypon.com
Editorial Manager Reaches, and Rapidly Surpasses 1,000 Live Journal Deployments
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September 15, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - In an industry first, Aries Systems Corporation is pleased to announce that the number of scholarly journals using Editorial Manager for online manuscript submission and tracking exceeded 1,000 on June 20, 2005. The 1,000th journal to go live with Editorial Manager was Advances in Anatomical Pathology published by Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
The Editorial Manager system has been successfully adopted by hundreds of independently-published, not-for-profit journals as well as commercially published journals. Feedback from users suggests that with each new release, Editorial Manager exceeds market expectations – user Sue Shock of Medicine, commented that, "EM has definitely made my life easier! The company anticipates features I’d like to see – sometimes even before I think of them.”
New releases of Editorial Manager are delivered approximately twice annually and all journals can take advantage of new features immediately upon release of the software. Upgrades are highly transparent to journals and users, require no service interruption, and do not incur any additional costs or delays.
When asked about future milestones for Aries Systems and Editorial Manager, Lyndon Holmes, President of Aries Systems Corporation said, "Widespread deployment is not our primary goal, but it is the happy byproduct of our passion for software and service excellence. We will continue to focus like a laser on the needs of the scholarly publishing sector. Our software platform has proven scalable and capable of delivering seamless enhancements. By maintaining a continuous dialogue with customers, our goal is simply to provide the best online peer review system in the world and let them be the judge.”
Aries Systems Corporation Offers Free Copies of the ALPSP Report
[pdf version]
September 12, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - In June 2005, The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers ALPSP) published an independent study of “Online Submission and Peer Review Systems.” The report gives an objective account of the current state of online peer review systems, including a comprehensive overview of all available systems, descriptions of their features, and it offers a framework for analysis and choosing among them. It then presents the results of three specially-commissioned surveys of authors, referees, editors and publishers.
As part of its service to prospective customers, Aries has purchased copies of the ALPSP report to disseminate to journals and publishers currently evaluating (or re-evaluating) online peer review systems. To find out more about obtaining a free copy of the report, interested scholarly organizations should send an email with their contact information to marketing@edmgr.com.
Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Aries commented, "Selecting the right peer review system is one of the most strategically significant decisions facing journals today. As part of the evaluation process we are pleased to make available copies this independent report at no charge."
Copies of the report can also be purchased for $99 by ALPSP members and $175 for non-members by visiting:
http://www.alpsp.org/publications/pub10.htm
Editorial Manager User Group Meeting Judged a Major Success
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June 24, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - Over 100 people attended the Third Annual EMUG Meeting in June of 2005. This two-day meeting featured workshops, a reports clinic, breakout sessions, and a stunning reception at the Top of the Hub restaurant. Unlike previous EMUG meetings, the format for EMUG2005 consisted of concurrent session focused on specific aspects of the Editorial Manager and Preprint Manager systems. This allowed for attendees to pick and choose the sessions and workshops that most suited their needs. Both Aries staff and business partners, such as The Sheridan Group and Inera Inc., led the presentations and workshops.
Users were given a sneak preview of Editorial Manager Version 4.0. They saw the latest innovations such as: Reference Checking and Linking (using Inera's eXtyles software plug-in); the ability to pass search queries to third-party bibliographic databases and search systems, such as Ovid, Scopus, and Google Scholar; improved Reviewer performance data and reports; and a number of enhancements to EM's e-mail capabilities, such as the ability to send ad hoc communications, alternate letter selection, increased customization of emails, and a new reviewer thank you function.
In the Reports Clinic users were able to gain hands-on experience using the Custom Reports and General Data Export tools. There was a strong focus on using Excel and other applications to manipulate and display data, and to create highly individualized reports. This dynamic session was so popular that it ran almost constantly throughout both days. What made this session even more instructive for users was the way veteran users assisted the less experienced with their reporting issues. All participants gained a deeper understanding of EM's reporting capabilities, including when to use a 'canned' report versus when a custom report would better suit their needs.
The EMUG Reception took place at the Top of the Hub restaurant on the 50th floor of the Prudential Tower, a Boston landmark that can be seen from up to 40 miles outside of the city on a clear day. This provided people with an opportunity to network and socialize with other EM users. The fact that it was the second day of summer (thus the second longest day of the year) and the fact that it was a full moon, combined or a spectacular, long-lasting view of Boston, Boston Harbor and the surrounding towns. The guests were very pleased with this year's venue.
Evaluation forms filled out by attendees showed a consensus of opinion that the User Group Meeting is an excellent way to network with colleagues and to learn how different EM users approach workflow and policy issues. Users felt that the meeting was 'Very Useful', 'Extremely Useful', 'Incredibly Useful', and one user even declared that the meeting was 'Amazingly Useful'. Among the favorite sessions were the Reports Clinic, the eXtyles breakout session, and the New Features Workshop.
The Aries staff particularly enjoyed meeting clients in person, and receiving suggestions on what new features should be considered for future releases of EM. An important goal of the meeting was to display Aries' commitment to enhancing users' productivity and to developing technology to help journals thrive.
Quotes about EMUG2005:
"This meeting is a great opportunity to network with fellow EM users and share ideas for problem solving."
Tracy Napper, Annals of Emergency Medicine
"The entire two days were chock-full of useful information. We were treated as if our questions were important
to Aries."
Sue Houchin, Medical Care
"These sessions are a 'must' for those thinking about EM and for current users - if you don't know how a feature
works - ask - don't complain."
Catherine Prysiazny, Journal Prosthetic Dentistry
"Very informative, interactive and fun training."
EMUG attendee
Quotes about the EM system:
"Aries is taking the suggestions from users very seriously. This is shown in the regular upgrades of the system
addressing our needs."
Judy Bothof, Springer
"This product is extremely user-friendly and gets better and better with each enhancement and new version."
Karen Cullen, Springer
"EM is essential. I cannot imagine functioning without it. Customer service is extraordinary; well above that of any
other organization."
Donna Stroud, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
"EM has definitely made my life easier! You anticipate features I'd like to see - sometimes before I even think of
them (such as reference checking and linking with eXtyles). Thank you."
Sue Shock, Medicine
"With EM, I can do twice the work in half the time it use to take me."
Leslie Thacker, Diagnostic Molecular Pathology
"I can't imagine going back to hard copy after using EM."
Sandra Perrine, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
"EM has made my life much easier."
Nancy Kriigel, American Journal of Surgical Pathology
"I couldn't do it without EM!"
Jackie Lynch, The Larygoscope
"Impressed - can't wait to start using EM!"
Jackie Perry, American Society for Civil Engineers
"EM is the editorial tool no journal can do without."
Meg Etherington, Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Photos from EMUG 2005
Richard Wynne (Aries' Vice President of Sales and Marketing) discusses the
development of features in Editorial Manager
Tony Alves (Product Manager for Editorial Manager)
Standing room only
Breaking for lunch
Getting our just desserts
Alden Group and Aries Systems Link Up to Offer Start-to-Finish Manuscript Workflow
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June 7, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA The Alden Group and Aries Systems Corporation have joined forces to make the verification and transmission of journal manuscripts simpler and faster. Manuscripts that have been accepted by Editorial Manager, the online peer review system created by Aries, can now be automatically forwarded to Alden's MIS - a comprehensive web-based tool that controls and tracks all production.
This innovation means that publishers can validate manuscript metadata against the appropriate DTD using Editorial Manager, and then the XML and author source files are automatically transmitted directly into the Alden MIS ready to be processed. This streamlined workflow not only saves on resources, but also guarantees accuracy at all stages through quality checks built into both systems.
The automated workflow was developed at the prompting of the British Psychological Society, a mutual customer of Aries Systems Corporation and the Alden Group. Commenting on the new functionality, Julie Neason, Journals Manager at the British Psychological Society, said, "Collaboration between vendors is critical to ensure seamless manuscript workflow from submission to publication. We're very happy with the outcome, and anticipate that further improvements will emerge from the broader use of XML and other Web-based technologies."
Michael Angless, Sales Director for the Alden Group, added: "We anticipate that other journal publishers will wish to benefit from the time and cost savings provided by this solution."
Editorial Manager is a proven tool, currently used to validate almost 950 scholarly journals. The Alden Group provides printing and production services, both UK-based and offshore, to a wide range of book and journal customers.
About Alden Group - The Alden Group (http://www.alden.co.uk) was founded in the historic city of Oxford as a small, family-owned business and has grown into an international company at the leading edge of modern publishing solutions. Today Alden employs 200 staff in the UK, split between its Oxford and Northampton sites, and a further 500 staff in Chennai, India. Its turnover last year was £14 million.
Jennifer Fleet Joins Aries Systems' Management Team as the Director of Customer Services
Jennifer Fleet has joined Aries Systems' management team as the Director of Customer Services. Her role at Aries is to manage the customer service department and work closely with users to assist them in training, implementation, and getting the most from the Editorial Manager system.
Jennifer's ten years of experience in the scholarly publishing industry includes: Marketing Manager for T&F Informa; Production, Licensing, and Marketing Manager for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS); and Production Manager for The Plant Cell; in addition to positions with the Journal of Neuroscience and the American Diabetes Association's scholarly journals. She recently earned her MBA from Johns Hopkins University.
Aries Sees Accelerated Adoption of Online Peer Review with Editorial Manager
[pdf version]
March 15, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - In 2004, the Pharmaceutical Press, the publications division of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, became one of the first major European society publishers to adopt online manuscript submission and tracking. Following a comprehensive evaluation, the Pharmaceutical Press selected Editorial Manager for its flagship publication,"The Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology". Using Editorial Manager's web-based administration tools, the Society was able to configure the application without the need for costly and time-consuming software engineering changes, and the site was rapidly made available to the worldwide author community. Since then, regular system updates with enhanced functionality have been successfully implemented without interruption of the journal's operations or any need for retraining.
Commenting on his experiences with Editorial Manager, Paul Weller, Publisher, Pharmaceutical Press, said, "Moving to online peer review has been a very rewarding experience and is changing the way we think about our publishing activities. For example, we have seen a substantial increase in the number of manuscripts submitted, especially from Asia, and this creates fertile opportunities for broadening our publishing initiatives." Partly as a result of this success, the Pharmaceutical Press has recently expanded its use of Editorial Manager to a second journal, The International Journal of Pharmacy Practice.
The popularity of online peer review with authors, reviewers and editors is prompting other publishers and scholarly societies to take advantage of the technology. The following publishers have recently signed contracts for the deployment of Editorial Manager for their journals: Maney Publishing (Including the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining), CABI Publishing, Carl Hanser Publishers, and Woodhead Publishing. Lyndon Holmes, President of Aries Systems Corporation, commented, "We are seeing an accelerated adoption of online peer review as editorial boards realize that continuous and effective use of the web to manage the author relationship and peer review process is critical to their success. Our goal at Aries is to provide societies and publishers with the best possible technology to achieve this success."
Aries Systems Corporation Starts the Year with New Customers and a New Release of
Editorial Manager®
[pdf version]
January 7, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - Aries Systems Corporation is pleased to announce the release of Editorial Manager version 3.1, which delivers important new peer review workflow management capabilities to the scholarly publishing community:
- Conference Submissions: A new tool that facilitates the submission, processing and extraction of conference submissions. This allows publishers to use either their existing journal submission site, or an additional submission site with linked user databases, to process conference abstracts and proceedings.
- Journal Office Enhancements: Journal office options now include the ability to require authors to respond to journal-configurable submission questions, and the ability to configure HTML email letters that include journal branding.
- Enhancement of the Editorial Manager Data Storage System: While the upgrade to the new data storage architecture will be transparent to users, it will greatly improve the performance of the Editorial Manager database, and also provide greater efficiency in back-up and restore procedures.
The new release will be provided free of charge to existing Editorial Manager customers and rollout will be coordinated to avoid any disruption of day-to-day journal office operations.
Commenting on the new release, Tony Alves, Product Manager for Editorial Manager, said, "Enhancements in the 3.1 release make it easy to process conference submissions using Editorial Manager. For example, accepted conference abstracts can be manipulated and ranked into publication order, and exported from the system in a structured format for onward reproduction on CD-ROM, in print or the Web. Although many of the other technology enhancements in Editorial Manager will be invisible to users, they are part of the substantial, ongoing infrastructure upgrade investment required to retain market leadership with this type of content management application."
Aries' ability to deliver frequent, feature-rich new releases and to seamlessly upgrade users has played a major part in attracting new customers. In addition to the recently announced enterprise agreement with Springer SBM, Editorial Manager has been chosen by several new journals and scholarly societies, including the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the American Animal Hospital Association, Duke University Press, the Canadian Academic Accounting Association, the Veterinary Dermatology journal (published by Blackwell), the Quarterly Journal of Medicine (published by Oxford University Press), Lifelines and the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecological and Neonatal Nursing (both published by Sage Publications).
Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, said, "Scholarly journals are rightly concerned about not just having the best system this year, but also about having the best system every year. The practical expectations of authors, reviewers and editors are growing so quickly that only vendors with a proven ability to rapidly deploy new functionality to their entire user base will remain competitive."
Springer SBM Selects Editorial Manager® for Enterprise Deployment
[pdf version]
January 3, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA - Springer SBM, a leading publisher of more than 1,300 scholarly journals, and Aries Systems Corporation are pleased to announce an agreement that brings the benefits of online manuscript submission and tracking to the world's authors, reviewers and editors. As part of the agreement, the Editorial Manager online peer review system will be rolled out to several hundred journals published by Springer SBM during the next two years.
Using Aries' Editorial Manager system, Springer SBM will enhance the level of service that it offers to the scientific community while simultaneously reducing the cost and time to publish a manuscript. The agreement is the outcome of a three-year extended pilot project that saw the successful deployment of the system to more than 140 journals, and integration with the company's Documentum®-based production tracking systems.
Arjan Grootenboer, Executive Vice President of Production at Springer SBM, commented, "Publishers have historically seen the Internet as a distribution medium, but with Editorial Manager it also becomes an engine of content generation and scientific discourse. In view of this exciting opportunity to better serve our customers, we are pleased to extend our agreement with Aries Systems Corporation for the rapid deployment of Editorial Manager to a much larger group of journals."
Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Aries Systems, added, "During the past three years we have relentlessly enhanced Editorial Manager based on feedback from the scientific community and we are happy that this agreement will make the system available to a much larger group of users."
About Aries:
Aries Systems transforms the way scholarly publishers bring high-value content to the world. The company’s innovative and forward-looking workflow solutions manage the complexities of modern print and electronic publishing – from submission, to editorial management and peer review, to production tracking and publishing channel distribution. As the publishing environment evolves, Aries Systems is committed to delivering solutions that help publishers and scholars enhance the discovery and dissemination of human knowledge. Publish faster, publish smarter, with Aries Systems.
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