Commitment to International Standards

Commitment to international standards and open architecture ensures maximum data flexibility and portability.

Aries Systems Corporation recognizes that open standards and XML interfaces are essential system characteristics because they facilitate optimal use and portability of publisher content. For example, our systems are fully compliant with ISO 10646 (Unicode).

Why is Unicode Important?

When authors enter their name and manuscript title into the system they can freely use international characters (such as umlauts, accents, Japanese characters or mathematical symbols such as π). In a truly Unicode compliant system, the journal office staff can subsequently locate data using those characters in search queries. It also means that data can be exported to other Unicode compliant systems without the time and cost required to translate non-standard data.

Some peer review systems simulate Unicode compliance by storing symbols such as π using custom tags, but this provides none of the underlying benefits of the ISO standard that are part of the standard Editorial Manager solution. Checking for true ISO compliance is essential because in the long run a non-standard system could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional data conversion costs. (How do I test for Unicode compliance?)

Aries has designed Editorial Manager so that it can interface with third-party production tracking systems using XML. Inversely, Aries’ production tracking system (Preprint Manager) can also interface with peer review systems using XML. This open approach ensures that customers are not locked into a single system for all aspects of their publishing workflow, and can select each module based on merit and suitability.

Aries Systems Corporation has also proposed the development of an open industry standard called SMXF (Submission and Manuscript eXchange Format) to facilitate the portability of data between different systems so that users don’t become “locked in” to proprietary data structures. See press release.

How do I test for Unicode compliance?

1. Use the Web to navigate to the log-in page of the system you wish to test.
2. In your browser menu, select View > Encoding.
3. If the page is Unicode compliant "Unicode (UTF-8)" will be highlighted.