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What is "Author Reception"?

Speaker: Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz, CERN

The name remains from the early days of electronic publication. Author Reception fronted the Proceedings Office to avoid disturbing the concentration of the Editors. It was the place where authors would go to request information as to the status of their paper. In those days the paper may have been submitted via diskettes ... And there were numerous exchanges between the editors and the authors via the Author Reception.

We were in the "paper era".

Gradually, with the introduction of our SPMS and Volker Schaa's modern scripting tools, it was possible to rip out titles, abstracts and authors from the editor's pdf processed files, and place them on pages to be compared with the SPMS metadata.

The methodical and fastidious cross check previously carried out by the Scientific Secretary, often post-conference, became the central task of the future electronic era Author Reception. A typical medium-sized JACoW event will comprise a couple of people to do this cross check.

The task is critical for good publication since the staff will cross check the data entered in SPMS (title, abstract, authors) against that on the paper, which is considered the "reference", and update the SPMS metadata which will be used in the final publication package.

Staffing

Depending on the number of papers being edited, 2 to 3 members of the JACOW Team man the "Author Reception" who are typically:

• A person with Admin privileges on the Central Repository to be able to add/remove authors on papers, request new affiliations (or add them)
• A local person, and as many other persons as necessary with good communication skills

At large events, all of the processed papers need to be cross checked so the workload will vary greatly and influence the number of persons in this activity.

Location

It is convenient if the Author Reception staff are close to the Proceedings Office so they may relay concerns authors may have to the editors.

The office is usually manned between 08.00 and 18.00 hrs, matched to just before and just after the hours of the conference schedule.

Each member of staff has a dedicated PC with access to the conference instance. Each one has Sort/File/Edit privileges in Roles and Responsibilities in SPMS to perform this role, and one (or more) have Admin privileges when it is necessary to modify profiles, add authors, etc.

The workflow is the following:

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 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 of the paper and no further upload is possible.

Authors receive a mail when the status is assigned. They can log in 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 in the log of their paper to better understand the reasons behind a yellow or red status. 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 accept the editor's changes and electronically change their paper status 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 with each session. Red dotted papers are in a separate folder.

QA Process (Quality Assurance)

Once QA begins (later in the week) 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 which have been final QA'd may be filed, or simply kept aside for reference, but frequently they are simply destroyed at the close of the conference since the history is in SPMS.

Author & Title Cross-checking

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 page per contribution with the title and authors as they appear on the paper at the top, and the metadata and in SPMS at the bottom.

Author reception staff cross-check this data and highlight any discrepancies.

The person with Admin privileges in the Conference SPMS instance will make all necessary changes in SPMS.

At paper upload authors are prompted to check the title and list of authors on the paper against that submitted in the SPMS metadata, but in spite of this, 30% or more of the papers will present discrepancies, some serious.

Cross-checking of titles and authors is time-consuming and fastidious, 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, over all contributions.