The Journal publishing process involves a series of steps and each of them comes with their own challenges which can require some time, effort, and money.
Oftentimes, depending on the publisher’s size and business model, it’s ineffective to handle the whole publishing process in-house, so the publishers choose the outsourcing option to assign some of their tasks to professional editing companies.

The Importance of Communication

The first aspect that has a huge impact on the publishing process is the communication between its participants: authors, editorial board, typesetters, language editors, artwork editors, and publishers:

• firstly, the author submits their manuscript to the peer-review system. Peer-reviewers (or editorial board) then evaluate the paper and either accept it for the publication, reject it, or send it back to the author for revision.
• once the paper is accepted, it undergoes the technical editing phase which involves a combination of or all of the following paper preparation steps: copyediting, typesetting, language editing, and artwork preparation. Typesetters carry a great responsibility of making sure that the article meets the journal’s requirements and keeping the author informed about the modifications made in their paper.
• the last step – the journal is uploaded to the hosting platform and published.

To better manage their time and resources, it’s recommended for journals without in-house typesetters to find a reliable publishing partner that provides high-quality typesetting and copyediting services while ensuring efficient communication between the publisher and the author.

The Technical Factor

There are several technical factors that also play an important role in journal publishing. As you may already know, in the journals within the scope of math, physics, or computer sciences, LaTeX is the leading scientific typesetting system. LaTeX is known for its rather complex formatting process so it’s crucial to hire an experienced typesetter with extensive knowledge of this application if you want your journal’s content to have flawless layouts on the first try.

While you always have the option of using cheaper services of freelance typesetters and copyeditors, it’s very likely that their work will contain errors when preparing the journal for the final publication. It may negatively impact your reputation as a publisher among authors who choose your publishing house.

If you don’t have a typesetter in your publishing organization team and the main input from authors is LaTeX files, it’s worth considering starting a partnership with a company specializing in LaTeX typesetting and copyediting. This way, you’ll have the guarantee that your journals are in the hands of skilled professionals and that each article meets the technical publishing requirements.

VTeX is a committed team of experts with years of experience in the publishing field, professionals create and use advanced tools that help to bring scientific content to perfection. According to publisher requirements, VTeX can prepare PDF, a full-text XML conforming to a specific DTD, just metadata XML, or XML containing all the required elements of an article and supplementary materials.

VTeX offers a full package of professional typesetting assistance which also includes copyediting, language editing, artwork preparation.