Debrief, Running of Author Reception

Contact: Sue Waller (Science and Technology Facilities Council Daresbury Laboratory Accelerator Science and Technology Centre)

This presentation goes through the steps of Author Reception which has changed over the years with the advancement of JACOW processes.

Location

It is convenient if the office is close to the Proceedings Office so that a member of staff may relay concerns the author may have to the editor if they are not in agreement.

The office is usually manned between 08.30 and 18.00 hrs.

2-3 members of staff (depending on the size of the conference) are required to man a dedicated office for Author Reception. Each member of staff requires a PC with access to the conference instance. They should be given Sort/File/Edit privileges in Roles and Responsibilities in SPMS to perform their role.

Dotting Process

Papers that are edited are assigned the following coloured status by an editor:

A green dot is assigned when a paper has been processed by an editor and passed all editorial criteria. The author need take no further action and the paper is ready for QA.

A yellow dot is assgned when the editor has made some small changes to the paper and requires the author to approve these changes. Changes could be formatting problems that have been fixed. There is no change to the scientific content and no further upload is possible.

Authors should log on to the SPMS instance for the conference and read the comments from the editor. If they are in agreement with the changes and have checked the new pdf they can change the status of their paper to green ready for QA and ultimately publishing. No further upload by the author is possible.

A red dot means the paper cannot be processed by the editor. The author may not have used the JACoW template, references may be missing in the text, figures not referenced in the text or the paper exceeds the paper limit set by the conference. The author must fix the problems and reupload the paper.

The electronic dotting board is usually located close to the Proceedings Office but authors may ask Reception staff to check on the status of their paper. If the author does not understand what he/she has to do to fix the problem the Reception Staff can check which editor has been assigned to the paper and ask the editor to discuss the issues with the author.

Although authors have the ability to change their paper from yellow to green they may also visit Author Reception to ask the staff to do this. The member of staff completes the change through sort/file/edit.

Editors print off hard copies of the papers which are filed in binders in Author Reception.

It is not necessary to file the green dotted papers, these can be kept for QA.

Filing trays are located in the proceedings office for editors to place the papers in when they have finished editing. Reception staff then collect periodically and take to Author Reception for filing.

The Author Reception staff place all hard copies of green dotted papers into a tray labelled 'QA'. Yellow dotted papers are filed in binders labelled by day and then paper number. Red dotted papers are in a separate folder.

A report is printed daily which shows papers turned to green by the author for the Reception staff to manually change the hard copy papers.

QA Process (Quality Assurance)

Once QA begins (when 80% of the papers have been processed) all green dotted papers are taken back to the Proceedings Office and placed in a tray 'for QA'. A different editor will then process the paper and pick up any issues missed. Once the paper is finished the editor puts the paper in a tray 'QA Final'. Any papers failing QA are dealt with by an editor.

Papers are then collected and either taken back to the Lab/Institute or disposed of.

Author & Title Cross-checking

Before publication it is necessary to check that the data entered by authors in SPMS (paper title and co-authors) matches the same data on the contributions. If titles have changed, or if the author list has evolved since abstract submission this must be corrected. This process can take place during or after a conference.

For final publication on JACOW, the metadata in the SPMS concerning the paper title and list of authors must match that on the paper.

Volker Schaa prints a document with the title and authors as they appear on the paper and in SPMS. Members of reception staff then cross-check all this information and highlight any discrepancies. The Repository Manager then makes all necessary changes to SPMS.

At paper submission authors are prompted to check their title and list of authors against that submitted on their abstract but there are still a large amount of errors, although this has reduced substantially.

Cross-checking of titles and authors is time-consuming, especially for the larger conferences, but it is important to get this right as once the proceedings are published on JACoW it is extremely difficult to correct anything without having to run the scripts again.