The Peer and Editorial Collaboration System is the second is the second of two systems that comprise the Editorial Content Creation platform for VisualML (See Content Acquisition and Curation System for details on the first system).  The Editorial Collaboration System begins immediately content has been submitted by the content creator (i.e. author) in the Content Acquisition and Curation System).  The internal (publishing house) and external (peer reviewers, contractors) work upon the Document with full revision tracking and control in an innovative, dual-window interface that enables review, collaboration/commenting and editing the content.  Comprehensive, configurable workflow facilitates passing the document between stakeholders (e.g. for peer review, grammar editing, fact checking, image clean-up, etc).  Completed content is marked for production.  The full process of the Editorial Collaboration System is described below. 

Both the Peer and Editorial Collaboration and the Content Acquisition and Curation systems are composed of three primary tool groups

 

  1. Composer:  Is the central set of tools which empower both publishing house internal and external stakeholders to create content - all in structured XML stored in the Central Content Repository.  Generally, Composer is not heavily used in the Peer and Editorial Collaboration System, unless the publisher's preferred workflow is to create Work level Documents (front- and back- matter) at this stage of creation rather than during Content Acquisition.
  2. Curator:  Similar to the operation of Curator in the Content Acquisition System, Curator in the Collaboration System wraps around composer and is operated primarily by publishing house internal stakeholders.  At this stage it is primarily used at this stage to edit existing documents for editorial content, peer review, and document clean-up.
  3. Commander:  Wraps around Composer and is operated by all stakeholders.  It provides workflow control, user dashboards, reports and the ability to check status on Documents in the workflow.  It is used most heavily as Documents are being created in Composer.

The workflow and interaction of the stakeholders with the System is shown in the figure below:

The user interface and workflow for Peer and Editorial and Collaboration System is best explained with screen shots as shown below.

The The screen capture above illustrates the initial instantiation of the dual-window editing system.

 

  • In the left pane is the full edit capability for all fields of the Document being worked upon.  
  • In the right pane is the preview generation (transformed from the XML to XHTML for presentation) of the Document.  
  • Stakeholders can make whatever modifications are necessary in the edit fields and have them updated in the preview.  
  • When the edits are saved, a new version of the Document is created in the system and me be viewed, compared to other versions of the document and reverted to as necessary in the future.  
  • Note the tab set on each pane that allows personal-selection of which display is shown in each pane at any given time.

The screen capture above shows the workflow and comment tabs.  

The workflow tab presents the user with the following

  • allowed next states for the document
  • Schedule for state change
  • immediate (when Save button is pressed)
  • Scheduled (any time in the future date/time)
  • Collaboration Comments
  • Note that a Document need not change state to store  Collaboration Comments.  Simply filling in the comments and pressing the Save button stores the comments without changing the state of the Document.

The Comments tab shows a list of the comments made to the document, including the history of state changes.  

  • The upper portion of the view opens with the most current comment displayed.
  • Selecting a comment entry in the history displays that comment in the upper half of the view.

Commander handles all the heavy lifting of the internals of VisualML, it enables:

  • Full search of the XML stored in the Central Content Repository.
    • Basic keyword search
    • Advanced Search with customized facets including
      • Work Title
      • Document Title
      • Workflow State
      • Contributor
      • Categorization Tags
      • Date
      • Role
      • User
      • ISBN/ISSN/DOI
      • Volume and Issue
    • See the Search Module for full details 
  • Administration interface, and
  • Content download/export.

Contact VisualML for more details!