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.