Dovepress workflow software

The evolution of open access publishing

Dovepress came to us in 2006 as a traditional publishing company, printing and selling physical medical journals to libraries and institutions. Our first job was building a small eCommerce website to facilitate PDF downloads for selected articles.

The advent of open access publishing forced significant change on the medical publishing industry. The new business model required a high volume of publishing with quick turn around times, all the while maintaining quality and integrity of peer reviewed articles.

Manuscript publishing workflow

Open access publishing requires fast publishing times. The time between an author submitting a paper and the paper being published online and available for indexing is what makes Dovepress an attractive place to publish.

Automation and integration is key to publishing speed. Articles progress though various stages, including peer review, editorial selection, typesetting, proof reading, quality control etc. All these processing and quality control stages require close co-operation and interaction between departments and third parties. Any points of friction in the system need to be identified quickly and mitigated.

The article publishing software we have built for dovepress is an integrated end to end solution, tracking articles from submission until publication and beyond.

Why are Dovepress still using us for software development after 18 years?

Dovepress have been though a change of ownership and now have access to much larger offshore IT resources. Why do they stick with us for software development?

1) All in one solution

The web application software we built for Dovepress is a single integrated solution. The web application provides a single point of access for staff, authors, editors, readers, peer-reviewers, type setters and other parties involved in publishing.

2) Speed of development

Rules and trends change with little notice in the medical publishing industry. It is essential for the software changes to keep up with the pace of change, rapid development and short turn around times are essential.

Using our agile development methodology, we are able to quickly identify customer requirements and adjust the system in a timely manner.

Authors Customer Portal

Providing a super simple interface with timely and accurate communication for authors helps customer satisfaction.

Authors remain involved during the processing of their paper. Integration between the customer portal and the back end office functions is critical to keep good the article flowing through the publication process.

Integrity and Ethics

While the business model is focused on speed of publishing, the medical and academic world requires authors and articles to have integrity. Dovepress have rigorous internal teams and external reviewers/editors to check content is integral and ethical.

The application also uses some APIs and software measures to help ensure content is genuine and maintains integrity, such as Scidect (software for spotting machine generated content) and iThenticate (API for detecting plagiarism).

Indexing

Authors want to publish in journals which are registered with popular indexing services.

Through a series of APIs and other automated processes, the application automatically puts articles into widely recognised indexing processes including PubMed Central, Crossref, CNKI and Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

dovepress software application sample page

Customised reporting

Identifying bottlenecks in the workflow is critical. When one part of the publishing process is slowing down, management need to identify where the bottlenecks are and address them before articles pile up in the process.

Content Management

Highly customised content management directly from the back end to the website.

The content management solution involves a mix of application generated content and manually entered content.

dovepress marketing software screen shot

Marketing Emails

When an article is published, authors are kept up to date with readership numbers and indexing status. Post publication emails are carefully scheduled to ensure authors get timely information without overwhelming their inboxes.

Readers are kept up to date with the latest articles as they are published.

Business: Medical journal publishing.

Customer since: 2006

Website: Medical journal publishing.

What the customer has to say:

We started with a Microsoft FrontPage website that I built and maintained myself. However the business grew and I needed to have our website match the growing and increasingly complex demands of our business. We took the opportunity to rationalize our business processes and build those into the backend of our website. Chris Maffey was a great find for us and for the past 5 years we have worked closely with Chris and his team. I am happy to recommend Chris and maffey.com to anyone who is seeking to develop their business and have a world class website.

Timothy D Hill Dove Medical Press