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.