English 5387: Publications Management - Progress Posting 4

Question: Identify two unique user groups for your single-sourcing project (one different group for each deliverable). Describe the demographics, user needs, information requirements, technical background and other characteristics of these groups. Explain how they will impact your design and delivery of each product.

The two deliverables are a web-based version of the Notice to Authors and a printer-friendly version of the Notice to Authors. For the purpose of this discussion, I will call the user of the web-based deliverable Bob. Bob is more technically savvy and prefers an interactive document with links to additional information. Bob also may be environmentally conscious with a desire to not print excess pages. The document should be interactive, up-to-date, and usable

Within this discussion, I will call the user for the printer-friendly version Pat. Pat prefers a document that can be printed off for later consumption. The document should contain all information in a compact form that Pat can print and read at Pat’s leisure. Pat may not like to read online for assorted reasons and may be less comfortable with technology than Bob. Pat will want a readable, up-to-date, and comprehensive document.

Both Pat and Bob may not speak English as a first language, and despite preparing to submit papers to an English-language-based journal, they may have varying grasps of vocabulary, grammar, and usage. The language in both versions needs to be accessible, yet not so low as to insult the authors. In addition, much of the language is not negotiable.

Therefore, the language of the deliverables is likely to be nearly unaltered from the original form. For the web deliverable, the main page should be paired down to essentials with all additional information and examples provided as linked text or subpages. The printer-friendly deliverable will need to be comprehensive. Pat isn’t going to want to print multiple files.

The single-sourcing technology will make it easier to please both of these users and keep both files up-to-date easily.

English 5387: Publications Management - Progress Posting 3

Question: Taking the ten dependencies listed above in the supplemental content section and briefly assess each in terms of your single-sourcing project. You can quantify them using the dependencies calculator, if you like, or simply address each dependency with a short 1-2 sentence comment.

Project: Redesign Notice to Authors for ACS Combinatorial Science to provide 2 deliverables: one printable and one web-based.

Due Date: December 6, 2011

Time Remaining: 11 weeks

Product stability: Amount of change a product is likely to undergo during the course of a project.

Fortunately, this product is fairly stable for most journals. For ACS Combinatorial Science, this was last majorly revised for January 2011 with a minor revision mid-year for a change in the type of copyright transfer form. The stability of the product should be beneficial for this project.

Information availability: Accessibility of quality of information about the product(s).

This could be a moderate issue. I have access to the current version of the work and some word-of-mouth, manager-summarized feedback from the National Meeting. I also have experience with the employee’s view of the author uptake and retention of the information in the document. I do not have access to formal market research or user studies, and I will not be able to access this information because I signed an agreement stating that I would not use company resources for class work. I will have to look at the Notice type documents for other publisher and organizations to get guidance.

Prototype availability: Existence and quality of prototype under development.

This should be no issue at all. The most current version of the document is published and freely available on the company website.

SME availability: Availability of SMEs during the course of the project.

There will be no SME availability for this project for the same reasons described under information availability. I will have to use my own experience as a technical editor and some of the informal feedback we have received on this document.

Review experience: Quality and timeliness of reviews scheduled.

Since I will be reviewing the documentation myself, my skills as a technical editor should help with the quality. The timeliness may be an issue with yet another production push and my eyes drying out and blowing away at work. But I have control of this step with a project team of one and should be able exert control over this stage.

Technical experience: Degree of technical knowledge about the product(s).

I am very familiar with this type of document because I have been involved in the creation and updating of this type of document at least one time per year for 6 out of the 7 years that I have worked at my current job.

Writing and design experience: Degree of writing and design skill.

As a team of one, I will be relying on my skill and experience as a technical editor to work on the documentation. However, some of the language is lawyer mandated and cannot be changed not matter how awkward it seems. For Design, I have only my Document Design and Online Publishing classes to rely on for design, and my experience with some of our layouts at work. This should be a low to moderate problem.

Audience understanding: Extent to which user requirements are known and understood.

My understanding of the current document is that users find it to be too long and do not seem to retain the content. The legal content, such as copyright transfer, has to be there, but some of the examples could be moved to secondary pages that readers could visit if they desire more information.

Team experience: Expertise individuals have in working on collaborative teams.

With a team of one, team experience would seem to be a non-existent issue. However, I do have experience working on teams at my workplace, and I am comfortable with this dependency.

Tools experience: Expertise with specific tools and technologies used to produce the product(s).

Here, we run into my biggest concern. I have a very limited budget, so my current plan is to use a text editor to create my XML and MacRabbit CSSEdit to create my style sheet. I do not currently have a backup technology plan, and this could be a downfall. I chose both programs because I already own them and know how to use them.

English 5387: Publications Management Progress Posting 2

Question: Narrow your potential single-sourcing topic choices to one or two. For each, briefly outline some of the major goals and objectives of larger project. What two potential new source documents could you create? Also, identify some of the information needs of users of these deliverables.

Currently, I am leaning more strongly toward option 1 from last week: Option 1: Work on the Information for Authors document for ACS Combinatorial Science. The current deliverable is a PDF version of a Word Document. The Word Document is written by the Editor-in-Chief for the journal with the assistance of the Managing Editor if the journal has one. Then, the legal boilerplate is added wherever it fits within the context of the document. As a result, no two of the Journals has the same layout, order of information, or even total information content.

I see this project as an opportunity to use one of the longer samples to create a template into which we could conceivably fit the rest of the portfolio, providing consistency and perhaps enhancing author uptake. There are several challenges at this stage. My co-workers and I often despair of the authors’ desire to read these documents. Unfortunately, evidence tends to indicate that they do not read them, do not comprehend them, or simply disregard them in favor of writing and style methods long ingrained. Therefore, the first challenge is choosing a deliverable that will encourage author uptake. At my level, I do not have access to Marketing Research nor would I be permitted to poll the authors, so I will be forced to look at deliverables for other journals and other types of communication to design this document.

Another challenge that will be beyond the scope of this project would be to determine how well the content for the other journals (nearly 40 and growing every year) will fit into one format. We have worked hard to unify the design of the research content in the journals, perhaps a unified Instructions for Authors would not be such a hard sell at this point.

I think that the best two deliverables for this would be an interactive HTML product and a printable PDF product. Not all authors are happy to read instructions online. The users need to recognize the legal requirements of the journal: copyright, permission to reprint, no prior publication or concurrent submission to multiple journals. They also need to be able to find the required content for submission, review expectations, and general guidelines. The documents need to be readable and user-friendly. It needs to be easy to locate information that is not retained for later use.

This is working out to be a major project, which may or may not go anywhere in the long run, but I feel that this smaller scale project is an excellent place to start to learn what is or is not feasible.

English 5387: Publications Management - Progress Posting 1

Question: What potential topics are you considering for your single-sourcing project? List at least two alternative topics. Briefly address the pros and cons of each possible alternative.


Option 1: Work on the Information for Authors document for one of the ACS journals. The one for ACS Combinatorial Science is 21 pages, so it is longer than the 6-12 pages required for the assignment. These documents are created by the individual editorial offices for the journals with some guidance from the managing editors and some information from the legal department worked into the document. The linking is added to the Word file at our office and the Word document is converted to PDF. The linking within the document is rather weak. For example, if you click on the link for “Conflict-of-Interest Disclosure,” it jumps to the top of the page instead of to the actual section indicated. We could use a better HTML deliverable with more functional linking and a printable deliverable that would allow users to print the document if they prefer. We could use a format for this document that could be applied across all 44 current journals and any new journals added to the lineup. The complexity of such a widespread project exceeds that which is reasonable for the duration of a semester. However, I could feasibly do the work for one of the 44 that could feasibly be leveraged in the future as a template for the other products.

Option 2: I need to organize and present my recipes. I have some from my grandmother, written in a notebook, some saved in a word file, some as printouts tucked into cookbooks, some on my personal blog. Then the cookbooks are a whole different ball of wax. I need an organized document in which my grandmother’s recipes, my word file recipes, and my random pieces of paper need to be organized into deliverable that I can use to find and display my recipes in a reasonable amount of time. In addition, a deliverable that I can easily share with others is essential. Ideally, I would also be able to incorporate a listing of my favorite recipes from my large collection of cookbooks with the name of the cookbook and the page of the recipe. Again the scale of the project, especially the cookbook index, may be beyond a reasonable scope for a semester project, but the organization of the assorted non-cook-book recipes could fit within the parameters.

New Course: English 5387 Publications Management

My Fall 2011 course is English 5387 Publications Management. I have two courses left in my MATC degree including this one.