Please respond to sparc [at] arl [dot] org with requests for documents or more information, as well as additions or corrections to the following lists. Contact companies individually for product pricing.

For more information, reviews, and comparisons of these products and services:

• Online Submission and Peer Review Systems, Mark Ware, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. June 2005. 134 pages.
• A Survey and Evaluation of Open-Source Electronic Publishing Systems, Cyzyk, Mark; Choudhury, Sayeed, JScholarship, April 2008.
• Web-based Journal Manuscript Management and Peer-Review Software and Systems, Library Hi Tech News, 19(7), August 2002: 31-43.
• Bibliography and Summary: Electronic Peer Review Management, Kam Shapiro, University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office.

AllenTrack, Allen Press

AllenTrack is used for tracking manuscripts and accompanying correspondence through all stages of submission, preparation, and publication. The web-based application will also convert files from the major word processing formats to any of the major web-viewable formats.

author2reader, VISTA International

The author2reader framework offers proven solutions to many of the world's largest international publishers in areas such as information analysis, editorial and production management, and physical and digital fulfillment for both books and journals. The web-based or locally installed product supports all aspects of the publishing value chain, from author care through production, rights and royalties to fulfillment, integrated in an e-business environment with full access to the analytical power of Publishing Intelligence.

BenchPress, Highwire Press

BenchPress is an online manuscript management system that includes the facilitation of peer review. It is customizable for each journal and will generate reports and statistics on the editorial process. BenchPress can prepare manuscripts for print or online publication.

Contact: Highwire Press

EdiKit, Berkeley Electronic Press

Web-based management of all aspects of the editorial process for print or online journals, dissertations, monographs, and conference proceedings. For journals, EdiKit handles every step from submission to e-publication, including reviewer identification and tracking, correspondence management and reminders, revisions and resubmits, publication layout, and oversight of multiple issues.

Contact: info@bepress.com

Editorial Express, University of Maryland

Editorial Express is web-based software that can enable "paper-free" operation of the key editorial functions of a journal.

Editorial Manager, Aries Systems Corp.

This product is an online manuscript submission and tracking system. It provides a suite of customizable manuscript tracking and reporting tools for authors, reviewers, editors and journal office staff from submission to peer review and production.

Contact: Aries Systems

EJPress, eJournalPress

EJPress functions include manuscript submission, peer-review processing, document-tracking, submission to printing and web-based distribution systems manages manuscripts from submission to peer review and production. EJpress is web-based or components can be locally installed.

EPRESS, University of Surrey

EPRESS is aimed at promoting electronic publishing, and electronic journal take-up, in the social sciences and humanities. Tools help online manuscript tracking and journal production while providing access to reports on the process. Funding for EPRESS was provided by JISC's Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).

e-Publishing Services, Extenza

Extenza e-Publishing Services, part of Royal Swets & Zeitlinger, removes the need for a small publisher to purchase and maintain their own e-publishing system, while still allowing the publisher to control of their journals online. Extenza provides real-time online access and usage reporting to understand users and adjust content plans accordingly.

ePublishing Toolkit, Max Planck Society's ZIM

The software processes articles written in LaTeX with bibliographies prepared in BibTeX and produces an advanced web presentation in various formats. The software allows for reference and errata tracking, short cuts (pop-up windows) to cited equations, footnotes and article bibliography, and full-text search of the online articles.

ESPERE, ESPERE Consortium

The ESPERE consortium of academic publishers created the ESPERE service for online management of journals. The software manages online submission and peer review. The system is not integrated with a tracking database; consortial members use their own (often home-grown) databases. Data about the paper (title, authors, and submitting author's address details) are collected and can be can be supplied as files for transfer to a tracking database. Read more about ESPERE in a promotionalarticle.

e-Stacks, ScholarOne

e-Stacks is one of the suite of tools ScholarOne offers for online workflow management and collaboration in the production of web-based journals. e-Stacks displays journal content over the Internet as PDF files in which users may browse tables of contents or search across all journal data for articles of interest. If a society publishes and posts multiple journals, searches may be requested all or maintain any software themselves. Also, clients can use the applications one at a time or adopt the full suite of products to manage their organizations and communities.

Contact: ScholarOne

Journal, All Academic, Inc.

Electronic journal hosting services include a standard format that adapts to fit the journal publisher's style and indexing preferences. Journal articles may be accessed by All Academic's search tools or by direct link from the journal to an archived listing.

Contact: All Academic

Journal Management, Database Publishing Group Inc.

A web-based suite of products that includes all services and technology related to managing the workflow of manuscript submission, peer review as well as journal copy editing and publishing. The first solution implemented is PeerReviewAssistant(SM) which facilitates the web-based submission, peer review, acceptance/rejection process through to issue assignment.

Contact: DBPub

JournalSoft

JournalSoft® is a comprehensive, web-based solution for managing the pre-publication process for scholarly papers. The online application facilitates article submission and peer review by giving authors and reviewers realtime updates throughout the peer-review process. For instance, once a review is submitted, it is immediately available to the authors who can then respond to the review comment-by-comment using our unique response form.

LivePublish, NextPage

LivePublish is a comprehensive software solution for producing and delivering professional content on the Internet and on CD-ROM. A LivePublish(TM) solution enables professional publishers to easily and quickly assemble and deliver high-value content. Because content comes in different formats and sizes, LivePublish is designed to rapidly assemble disparate sources of information into a secure, manageable content collection. Content can be automatically updated, security applied and indexing options set, without a complex build process. That means your customers get a consistent interface for finding information quickly - through intuitive searching, a dynamic table of contents and customized search forms.

Contact: Nextpage

Independent Journal Program, BioMed Central

BioMed Central journals are web-based and all research articles are open access. The costs are covered by article processing charges (typically £750 per article), paid either individually, or collectively by' institutions through BioMed Central's membership scheme. The independent journal scheme allows groups of researchers, or societies, to publish journals with BioMed Central. BioMed Central provides the journal platform and manages technical aspects, while the editor(s)-in-chief have full editorial control. Revenue from article processing charges can be shared with the editors to cover administrative costs. More than 70 new independent journals have been launched through the scheme, and several existing journals have used the scheme to convert to open access . BioMed Central's publishing platform provides online systems to handle submission, peer review, acceptance and rejection, digitization, and publication in PDF, XML and HTML forms.

Open Journal Systems, Simon Fraser University

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing software system developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research. Available as open source, OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions to online publication and indexing. Through its management systems and its finely grained indexing of research, OJS seeks to improve the scholarly quality of refereed research.

OSPRey, National Research Council Press

The OSPRey online submission and peer review system was jointly developed with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CISTI) in Australia to be an innovative system that allows authors to:

• Register and submit manuscripts quickly and easily
• Submit manuscript in one file or in separate files for text, tables, and figures
• Submit in virtually any file format (including TeX)
• Keep up to date through e-mail messages from the editorial office
• Contact technical support in case of problems
• Check status of manuscript submission at any time
• Learn the outcome faster thanks to paperless, Web-based peer review
• Take advantage of a single log-on for multiple roles - author, reviewer, associate editor, even editor

See an implementation of the OSPRey web interface for NRC Press' journal Biochemistry and Cell Biology.

PUBLICATIONS, TheScientificWorld

TheScientificWorld publishes proceedings of abstracts as well as of peer-reviewed articles. All proceedings benefit from exposure through uniquely assigned ISBNs and linking to relevant literature databases, including their own database product, sciBASE. Staff can build web sites, alerting services and database products for educational and promotional purposes. This includes special commissioning and publication of high quality content suitable for scientific and medical audiences.

Contact: TheScientificWorld

Rapid Review, Cadmus KnowledgeWorks

The Rapid series of products, including Rapid Review, was built to expedit the preparation and delivery of file content while streamlining processes for ease. Based on publishing experience, specifically medical, technical and scientific journals, Cadmus KnowledgeWorks has a product to support every phase during the preparation, submission, reviewing, editing, publishing and distribution processes of an online journal. For instance, the web-based Rapid Review handles the many tasks associated with peer review and helps keep manuscripts and reviewers on schedule.

See Cadmus Uses the Web to Give Journals an Edge, Seybold Report on Internet Publishing, Volume 4, Number 10, pp. 7-11.

Contact: Cadmus KnowledgeWorks

Roquade, University of Utrecht

The Roquade project offers various options of electronic-publishing services, tools, infrastructure and know-how to learned societies, universities, university presses and individual researchers. These options vary from simple template-based text conversion tools for online publishing for a scientific journal's web site, to a full publishing process including storage and retrieval tools, security and sophisticated Web marketing. Roquade is an initiative of three Dutch university libraries.

See Roquade: Castling for Change, SPARC E-News, April 2000.

Scholarly Exchange

Not-for-profit Scholarly Exchange, Inc. provides a free and fully supported e-publishing platform. Combining Open Journal Systems public-domain software with complete hosting and support, this service offers scholars the flexibility to produce academic journals, at a price intended to foster the open access model.

Scholarly Exchange offsets its costs by contextually appropriate on-screen advertising, supplied by such sources as Google and Yahoo. Revenues exceeding the basic support threshold of $1500 yearly are shared with each journal, to help defray editorial costs. Journals that prefer an advertising-free environment may pre-pay the technology cost and enjoy the same platform benefits.SE provides options with the platform for OAI harvesting and LOCKSS compliance. The SE website offers information resources to help with archiving, ultra-low-cost tagging/data conversion, and short-run/print-on-demand services commercially available. Participating journals retain all rights to their metadata and content and may charge submission or publication fees to help defray editorial costs.

Contact: Scholarly Exchange

SmartPublishing, Mira Digital Publishing

SmartPublishing provides tools and services that make life easier for professionals working to produce scientific, technical, or scholarly publications in a variety of media such as print, CD-ROM and on the web. Services include scanning & document conversion, XML/SGML tagging, and custom application development.

Contact: Mira

Temple Peer Review Manager, Temple University

The software application, also known as TPRM, manages web-based peer review of articles submitted to scholarly journals or conferences. TPRM allows authors to submit papers easily in several different file formats with a Web browser. They also can manage all their submissions from one integrated Web based interface, using one account and one password. Since the system maintains and records the status of articles, authors wanting to know about their contributions can check via a Web site rather than contacting an editor. In addition, the system archives accepted, rejected, and withdrawn papers.

XpressTrack

XpressTrack allows a publisher to manage the editorial process through realtime, web-based monitoring of manuscript status. The software allows customized setup to match journal policies. Dynamically constructed menus permit users to see authorized options only. Logging into the system presents a list to the user of all tasks requiring his or her attention.

Contact: XpressTrack

Zope

Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the Python programming language that can be used to create online journals. It features a transactional object database which can store not only content and custom data, but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, and relational database connections and code. Zope has been used to create online journals.

Contact: Zope