River Valley helps GigaByte Journal join the “Publish, Review, Curate” Transformation of the Publishing Paradigm
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NEWS RELEASE 26 September 2023
\nNew “Publish, Review, Curate” models of peer-review on showcased by GigaScience Press Journal
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Timed for Peer Review Week, GigaScience Press are announcing that their GigaByte Journal has integrated a novel “Publish, Review, Curate” (PRC) peer-review model, in partnership with eLife. Using the Sciety platform GigaByte is now offering a highlighted editor’s assessment of each reviewed preprint, this endorsement helps readers gauge the interest and importance of the work, while also throwing light on the review and assessment process of research.
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GigaByte is an Open Science journal that has the principle goal to match the speed of publishing to the speed of research. When it launched in September 2020, it was one of the first journals to mandate the use of preprints, to help increase transparency and speed up the dissemination of research. GigaByte then connected their articles to previously published preprint versions by crosslinking and highlighting these links via an Article Information section on their articles. With the rise of preprint peer review and evaluation policies, the logical next step has been to utilise bioRxiv and Sciety integrations that enable the sharing of these open peer reviews on any associated preprint in bioRxiv and medRxiv. We also share these preprint peer reviews in Sciety “Reviewing Groups” to enable further discoverability and insight for readers.
\nIn a new step, GigaByte is now building on this “publish then review” model of scientific communication by adding an endorsement step by aligning it with eLife’s new “publish, review, curate” model that puts preprints first. This is done using the new “Curating groups” feature from Sciety, to distinguish groups that offer some form of assessment/endorsement of a preprint. These Endorsement statements from GigaByte featured on this page are also highlighted on the original bioRxiv preprint as well as the associated Sciety article page. Altogether, this helps readers see at a glance why this preprint might be important or interesting.
\nIn January 2023, eLife became the first journal to embrace a new scientific publishing model, where every preprint that eLife sends for peer review will be published on their website as a “Reviewed Preprint” together with an assessment, public reviews, and a response from the authors. GigaByte is taking a step towards this “Publish, Review, Curate” (PRC) peer-review model, being the second journal after eLife to post these Editorial endorsements in Sciety “Curating groups”, alongside other evaluating communities such as Biophysics Colab.
\nGigaByte Chief Editor Scott Edmunds comments on this move, saying “We’d like to thank Sciety for helping us take this step towards meeting our goal of matching the speed of publishing to the speed of research through using their platform”.
\nKaveh Bazargan from GigaScience Press publishing partner River Valley Technologies notes that: “River Valley’s systems have been built to support the aims as well as the spirit of Open Science. This includes alignment with the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation which specifically promotes innovative approaches such as preprints and open peer review practices, as used here. Our peer review system, ReView, together with our XML-first end-to-end publishing system enables publishing within 24 hours of acceptance. River Valley platforms allow GigaByte to provide fully open data, accessibility and transparency, revealing the pre-publication and open peer review history. It is a pleasure to work with GigaScience Press with whom we continually push the boundaries.”
\nShane Alsop, Community Manager – Outreach, eLife, on behalf of the Sciety Team adds to this: “We’re delighted to be partnering with GigaByte to help facilitate their move towards a “publish first, then review” model of preprint peer-review. GigaByte are now providing an “editors assessment” statement to accompany each reviewed preprint displayed on Sciety. For the first time, these statements will allow multiple communities to strengthen/scrutinise the findings reported in a preprint through cumulative, post-publication review. This approach not only prioritises the importance of research integrity over publication venue, but combines with more traditional outputs of preprint review to make evaluated preprints a first class research object in their own right.
\nOrganisations as diverse as Biophysics CoLab and eLife successfully leverage Sciety to experiment with variations of the “PRC” model, and GigaByte’s own transition signifies a pivotal step towards wider adoption of “PRC”. With GigaByte’s support, we look forward to collaborating with more journals to catalyse wider adoption of more transparent – and equitable – modes of peer review.”
\nAs Open Science advocates this is just an incremental move for the journal, but we anticipate taking future steps to support a preprint-based publishing system. As the theme of Peer Review Week this week is “Peer Review and The Future of Publishing” this is a very timely and practical demonstration of exactly what the future can look like.
\nFollow GigaByte’s curated content on Sciety here: https://sciety.org/groups/gigabyte/
\nMedia contacts: GigaScience Editor-in-Chief: Scott Edmunds, Scott@gigasciencejournal.com, Office: +852 3610 3531 Cell: +852 92490853
Sciety/eLife Community Manager – Outreach Shane Alsop, shane@sciety.org
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About GigaScience Press
GigaScience Press is BGI’s Open Access Publishing division, which publishes scientific journals and data. Its publishing projects are carried out with international publishing partners and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press and River Valley Technologies. It currently publishes two award-winning data-centric journals: its premier journal GigaScience (launched in 2012), which won the 2018 American Publishers PROSE award for innovation in journal publishing, and its new journal GigaByte (launched 2020), which won the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. The press also publishes data, software, and other research objects via its GigaDB.org database. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research and to enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to all GigaScience Press journals that all supporting data and source code be made openly available in GigaDB or in a community approved, publicly available repository.
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley’s mission is to accelerate the communication of research through automation and easy-to-use publishing platforms. These help societies and publishers manage and deliver their content more efficiently and more cost-effectively. Developed in-house from the ground up, River Valley’s platforms address the pain points felt by all stakeholders, from researchers preparing their manuscripts to publishers requiring perfect XML and immediate access to underlying data. River Valley was established in 1988 with the mission of delivering cutting edge solutions to academic publishers. Some 10 years ago, the company pioneered the first fully XML driven online authoring system and today boasts a number of publishing platforms. Together they deliver a fully automated end-to-end solution, including submission and peer review, XML-based authoring, and content hosting. With head office in London and offices in India, River Valley supports clients across EMEA, the USA and Asia. Clients include The IET, IOS Press, American Physical Society, The Sphere Association and GigaScience
Press: www.rivervalley.io
Contact: Maryam@rivervalley.io
NEWS RELEASE 11 October 2022 River Valley is proud to announce that GigaByte, a journal from its client, GigaScience Press, is a joint winner of the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Scholarly Publishing. The award was given in recognition of GigaByte\u2019s solutions for addressing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open...
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GigaByte wins the ALPSP Innovation Award using River Valley’s technology for open science
NEWS RELEASE 11 October 2022
River Valley is proud to announce that GigaByte, a journal from its client, GigaScience Press, is a joint winner of the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Scholarly Publishing. The award was given in recognition of GigaByte’s solutions for addressing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. River Valley delivered this solution using its end-to-end publishing system from submission and peer review to production and hosting, combined with third party integrations.
Scott Edmunds, Chief Editor of GigaByte, highlighted the role of River Valley Technologies: “XML-first publishing workflows have been talked about for a long time, but it’s gratifying for \u200b\u200bGigaByte to be acknowledged as the first to demonstrate not only that the system works, but that it has real-world benefits, such as reducing costs and increasing accessibility and interactivity in scientific publishing.
An excellent example of its use is that this system, due to its high speed and low cost, enabled the recent publication of a series on Vectors of Human Disease, sponsored by the World Health Organization.
More than half of the submissions were from Latin America, and our ability to publish these articles in our multilingual format further broke down barriers, allowing Portuguese and Spanish speakers to better comprehend the implications of important work relating to the public health of their communities.”
River Valley’s end-to-end publishing platform drastically reduces the time and cost of publication. The cost savings can be passed on to the researcher, opening the door for many researchers around the world.
GigatByte articles are published within 24 hours of acceptance. While GigaByte articles can still be downloaded as an industry-standard PDF, the article publication focus is on the XML content that links to the research data and the code to all of the dynamic features. As well as improving the readability for machines, the platform allows integrated language support as well as the ability to view the article in a dyslexic-friendly font.
River Valley Director Kaveh Bazargan said: “GigaByte’s openness and their appetite to push the boundaries of publishing has allowed us to deploy our unique XML-first technology to embed complex and interactive objects such as immersive 3D content. Articles can be published within 24 hours of acceptance.”
David Sommer, Chair of the judging panel said: “This year’s winners highlight how our industry is responding to the changing needs of authors and researchers together with the move towards making the scholarly record accessible to a broader audience worldwide.”
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley’s mission is to accelerate the communication of research through automation and easy-to-use publishing platforms. These help societies and publishers manage and deliver their content more efficiently and more cost-effectively. Developed in-house from the ground up, River Valley’s platforms address the pain points felt by all stakeholders, from researchers preparing their manuscripts to publishers requiring perfect XML and immediate access to underlying data. River Valley was established in 1988 with the mission of delivering cutting edge solutions to academic publishers. Some 10 years ago, the company pioneered the first fully XML driven online authoring system and today boasts a number of publishing platforms. Together they deliver a fully automated end-to-end solution, including submission and peer review, XML-based authoring, and content hosting.
With head office in London and offices in India, River Valley supports clients across EMEA, the USA and Asia. Clients include The IET, IOS Press, American Physical Society, The Sphere Association, IOP Publishing and GigaScience Press. www.rivervalley.io
Contact: Maryam@rivervalley.io
About GigaScience Press
GigaScience Press is BGI’s Open Access Publishing division, which publishes scientific journals and data. Its publishing projects are carried out with international publishing partners and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press and River Valley Technologies. It currently publishes two award-winning data-centric journals: its premier journal GigaScience (launched in 2012), which won the 2018 American Publishers PROSE award for innovation in journal publishing, and its new journal GigaByte (launched 2020), which just won the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. It also publishes data, software, and other research objects via its GigaDB.org database. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research and to enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to all GigaScience Press journals that all supporting data and source code be made openly available in GigaDB or in a community approved, publicly available repository.
About GigaByte
GigaByte provides a way to rapidly and cost-effectively share research, making the scientific process more inclusive and accessible to the broader community. It uses an exclusively XML-based publishing system that automates the production process and makes it effortless to change views, languages and embed interactive content. Enabling readers to directly interact with the underlying data and software allows immediate use of published research, improves reproducibility, and increases trust. Upon acceptance this system converts manuscripts to online – and PDF-ready articles within hours with minimal human intervention, dramatically reducing production time and cost to provide an equitable solution to publish open science. https://gigabytejournal.com/
Contacts: GigaScience Editor-in-Chief, Scott Edmunds, Scott@gigasciencejournal.com,
About ALPSP
ALPSP is the international trade association which supports and represents not-for-profit organizations that publish scholarly and professional content, and those that work with them. Membership of ALPSP is for the whole organization so all employees can take advantage of the benefits on offer. ALPSP is proud to have nearly 300 member organizations across 30 countries. ALPSP.org
River Valley will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair. To set up a meeting please contact Kaveh@rivervalley.io
The International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE) have awarded the 2022 Innovation award to River Valley Technologies, for their powerful and user-friendly submission and peer review platform, ReView. Director, Kaveh Bazargan, proudly accepted the award on behalf of the staff of River Valley whose tireless efforts over several...
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River Valley’s “ReView” awarded ISMTE Innovation award
The International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE) have awarded the 2022 Innovation award to River Valley Technologies, for their powerful and user-friendly submission and peer review platform, ReView.
Director, Kaveh Bazargan, proudly accepted the award on behalf of the staff of River Valley whose tireless efforts over several years have culminated in publishing platforms that are simply the best!
In the following interview published by Research Information, River Valley Technologies director Maryam Bazargan describes her early career, 10 years of working at River Valley Technologies, her love of languages and cultures, and the areas of scholarly communications that she is passionate about. River Valley Technologies director Maryam Bazargan describes her early...
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Fast publication can save lives – Interview with Maryam Bazargan
In the following interview published by Research Information, River Valley Technologies director Maryam Bazargan describes her early career, 10 years of working at River Valley Technologies, her love of languages and cultures, and the areas of scholarly communications that she is passionate about.
River Valley Technologies director Maryam Bazargan describes her early career, 10 years of working with her brother Kaveh, and her love of languages and cultures.
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications…
I spent my early days in the family home in Notting Hill Gate, London but was born in Bethnal Green hospital – so I suppose I could be considered a genuine Cockney!
Shortly after, my parents decided to move back to Iran and for a few years lived between the two countries. I was there for the revolution in 1979, when schools were closed for six months, and then the Iran/Iraq war. I moved back to London in 1983 – It was tough as I hardly spoke any English but thankfully there was another Persian girl in my class who translated things for me in the first six months.
I completed my GCSEs and A-Levels at Putney High School. I loved business and learning languages; I guess having been thrown in the deep end with no English helped. I studied Marketing with French and German in Newcastle, which I loved.
After my degree I moved back to London and while working in marketing for an international technology company, I got involved with an internet-based project in 1997; the project entailed setting up an internet TV Guide.
I realised the internet was the future and in 1998 moved to the world of media agencies (joining one of the largest media agencies, Carat/Aegis Media and was later headhunted to set up the digital media arm for Publicis in 2000), devising digital strategies for clients including Diageo, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo!, Apple and L’Oreal. I helped launch The new VW Beetle and Apple Mac in the late 90s.
The digital media industry was tiny in the 1990s and it felt like there was a new dotcom company launching every day – there was never a shortage of social events. It was an exciting time!
In around 2003, I became aware of the video-game industry’s market size and the untapped ‘media’ within the games. So I set up possibly the first marketing company specialising in in-game advertising – essentially setting up partnerships between video games and brands that wanted to engage with that audience.
We delivered some of the largest campaigns, including Reebok partnership with ProEvolutionSoccer (one of the largest football games). We realised the concept applied to many other sectors, and so extended to brand and TV, music and sports partnership. One of the most extraordinary experiences was working directly with Don King delivering partnership and sponsorship strategy for fights at Madison Square Garden – quite a character!
I love anything and everything about business – I joke about having set up my first business with my neighbour when I was six years old, selling paper fans in our street in Iran! What I enjoy is coming up with new ways of doing things and new business ideas – being an outsider to an industry helps with that – challenging the norm, and creating new opportunities.
You’ve been working with your brother Kaveh at River Valley Technologies for nearly 10 years now. What does the company do, and what is your role?
River Valley, now in its 34th year, has specialised in composition services for the STM market, in particular complex maths and LaTeX, and today delivers full end-to-end publishing platforms.
Around 10 years ago we started moving from a pure outsourcing company to a technology provider. Before joining, I didn’t have much knowledge of the STM marketing, but when Kaveh and I started talking about the industry and its stakeholders, we realised in fact there were a lot of similarities with other sectors that had been early digital adopters.
Over the last eight years I have been putting systems in place to deliver technology products to publishers. Our vision was to deliver an end-to-end publishing system in the cloud, so we began by dividing the workflow and developing cloud-based platforms for each stage of the workflow.
Today we have a full suite of publishing solutions for clients who can use one or all: from submission and peer review to production, tracking, proofing, publishing, discoverability and reporting.
Today I oversee all business operations at River Valley from business strategy to product delivery to clients. Our mission is to accelerate the communication of research and my job is to ensure we deliver this through thoroughly understanding industry requirements.
What have been the biggest developments in scholarly communications since then?
From a market point of view, the move from subscription to open access (OA) has been the most notable change in the last 10 years. Related to OA are the commendable moves to openness in other areas, such as open data and open peer review. Publishing systems and platforms have had to adapt accordingly, to ensure that new business models are catered for.
In the last two and a half years, during the Covid era, faster publication of research has become paramount – so the days of research being published months or even years after submission of an article might be over!
Consumers of research publications no longer want to be limited to downloading PDFs of papers. The TikTok generation wants to be able to have instant access on any device including mobile phones. This means publishers need to produce multiple formats and, crucially, must guarantee that all formats match.
Are there any areas of scholarly communications that you are particularly passionate about?
Speed of publication is probably what I am most passionate about. We have managed to perfect a system that allows full publication of all formats within 24 hours of completion of peer review. We are working on making the publication process even more streamlined. Fast publication can save lives!
Accessibility is another passion of ours. We want everyone to be able to access research with the minimum impediments. An example of a small enhancement that we have made to our sites is to allow readers to view the content as well as the interface in a dyslexic-friendly typeface. We have also given our clients the tools to translate the interface on their publication pages into any language they desire.
Removing barriers at both ends of the scholarly communication process is another passion of mine. In the most general sense, we want to allow anyone to publish anything as easily as possible, and for anyone to consume that publication easily and painlessly.
What are your wider hopes for the industry for the next 10 years?
We want to help increase automation in all stages of publishing, in order to bring down the cost of publishing, thus removing further the barriers to scholarly communication. A dream of ours is to allow ‘citizen scientists’, not only established scientists and researchers, to contribute to research communication. We have this in the back of our minds when building our platforms.
It would be good to see the cost of textbooks go down, thus alleviating the pressure on students. In addition, we want to see ‘live’ textbooks that are continually updated, ensuring that researchers always have the latest research at their fingertips.
Lastly, do you have any fascinating hobbies or pastimes you want to tell us about?
I love entertaining friends, whether it’s a dinner party at home or putting on a party. I have been known for my parties and have thrown a few with 400+ guests in the past – I just love meeting new people and connecting people with others.
I love to dabble in art and interior design, and have designed and renovated a few homes over the years, but sadly none of my paintings have made it to Sotheby’s yet!
Languages have remained really important to me – they say you live as many lives as the languages you speak and that is so true. I feel so frustrated when I go to a country and I don’t speak their language; over the years I’ve continued to study languages including Japanese and Spanish. I love travelling and exploring new places, understanding cultures; my favourite has to be Marrakech, a riot of colour, fragrance, design and of course souk treasure!
I am always fascinated to hear about other people’s businesses and their strategies – I don’t mind sticking my oar in! On a more serious level, I like listening to people’s business issues and love to help come up with solutions. I also mentor a few people; it gives me great joy seeing them and their businesses flourish.
Tracking papers from submission to publication London \u2013 15 October 2021 ICE Publishing is partnering with River Valley Technologies to introduce a new live data visualisation tool. DARVi (Data Analyser, Reporter, and Visualizer) will provide their editorial and production teams with an up to the minute view of their publishing...
", "news_full_content": "
ICE Publishing implements DARVi
Tracking papers from submission to publication
London – 15 October 2021
ICE Publishing is partnering with River Valley Technologies to introduce a new live data visualisation tool. DARVi (Data Analyser, Reporter, and Visualizer) will provide their editorial and production teams with an up to the minute view of their publishing operation, from submission to publication. Driven by article metadata, DARVi ingests information from River Valley’s ReView (submission and peer review) and TrAction (production management) systems to provide a detailed dashboard of operations. The tool also presents data from other sources, like CrossRef Funder Registry and COUNTER, eliminating the need to “create reports”.
Ben Ramster, Journals Manager at ICE Publishing said: “We are delighted to partner with River Valley Technologies to introduce this modern interface for the author, editor and reviewer community. The live data visualisations that DARVi provides will support both peer review and the open-access needs of funders and institutions.”
DARVi is a new system for analysing and visualising data. Publishers, librarians, funders and other stakeholders can see combined data from any number of sources on a user-friendly dashboard, and can fully personalize the output using interactive controls.
DARVi can display and report on and export any data relevant to publishing including the Plan S Price Transparency Framework.
Kaveh Bazargan, Director at River Valley said: “It has been a pleasure to work in partnership with the ICE to bring out the full potential of DARVi, successfully combining data from River Valley’s platforms and ICE’s third party systems.”
About ICE Publishing
Established in 1836, ICE Publishing is a leading provider of information for researchers and practitioners worldwide in the fields of civil engineering, construction and materials science.\u202f We are the publishing division of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), a non-profit society of over 95,000 members around the world. Our portfolio includes journals, archives and books which provide a gold-standard reference point for industry and academia.\u202f
www.icevirtuallibrary.com
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley’s mission is to accelerate the communication of research through automation and easy-to-use publishing platforms, thus helping societies and publishers manage and deliver their content more efficiently and more cost-effectively.
Developed in-house, River Valley’s platforms address the pain points felt by stakeholders, from researchers preparing their manuscripts to publishers requiring perfect XML and immediate access to business data.
River Valley was established in 1988 with the mission of delivering cutting edge solutions to academic publishers. Some 10 years ago, the company pioneered the first fully XML driven online authoring system and today boasts a number of publishing platforms. Together they deliver a fully automated end-to-end solution, including submission and peer review, XML-based authoring, and hosting.
With head office in London and offices in India, River Valley supports clients across EMEA, the USA and Asia. Clients include The IET, IOS Press, American Physical Society, The Sphere Association and IOP Publishing.
Contact: Maryam Bazargan
Email: Maryam@rivervalley.io
www.rivervalley.io
London, United Kingdom, 25 July 2019 \u2013 River Valley Technologies announce the launch of RVHost, the innovative content hosting platform, and the final component of their XML-based end-to-end scholarly publishing solution. The platform gives unprecedented control to publishers over their content, thus allowing them to create a brand new journal...
", "news_full_content": "River Valley launch publishing platform, completing their end-to-end publishing solution
London, United Kingdom, 25 July 2019 – River Valley Technologies announce the launch of RVHost, the innovative content hosting platform, and the final component of their XML-based end-to-end scholarly publishing solution.
The platform gives unprecedented control to publishers over their content, thus allowing them to create a brand new journal within minutes, or to schedule any publication for a precise date and time, e.g. timed with a press release. RVHost delivers full analytics, including an innovative graphical “history” of a publication, together with any citations. The system is fully customisable, multi-lingual and content agnostic, allowing it to host any form of data or multimedia.
RVHost will be launched in partnership with forward-looking STM journal, GigaScience, which will be using River Valley’s complete end-to-end publishing system.
GigaScience Executive Editor, Scott Edmunds, explains that it would have been impossible to achieve the changes that the GigaScience team envisioned for new journal development without partnering with River Valley Technologies: “In our seven years of pushing the boundaries of scientific publishing, our biggest frustration has been trying to work around legacy publishing obstacles. Working with River Valley Technologies – with their state-of-the-art, forward-thinking platforms – will finally allow us to put all our new ideas into practice.”
River Valley Technologies Director, Kaveh Bazargan said: “We designed RVHost to be powerful, yet simple to set up and to use. This means it is scalable and delivers time and cost savings for publishers of all sizes, from single-journal society publishers to those dealing with thousands of books and journals. The architecture is particularly suitable for a community platform for related publishers. Working with our highly innovative launch partner, GigaScience, will allow us to use the many features of RVHost to revolutionize how research is communicated.”
RVHost works beautifully on all devices, including mobile phones, and allows the reader to select their viewing preferences with options to view content in a larger typeface, or even in a typeface for people with dyslexia. When used with other River Valley platforms, RVHost delivers further benefits including the instant creation of personalised PDFs, and a comprehensive history of every manuscript. Publishing new versions of articles becomes an efficient and painless process.
The database architecture of RVHost has been designed to make transfer from other platforms easy – any legacy data is transferred losslessly and automatically during transition from other hosting platforms.
Kaveh Bazargan added: “RVHost fully supports Open Access publishing, ensuring compliance with Plan S. We ask all participating journals to adopt the COPE/DOAJ principles of transparency to ensure ethical publishing.”
RVHost links with a wide range of third party systems, including reference managers and metrics tools.
— ends —
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley’s mission is to accelerate scholarly communication. The company aims to streamline the publishing process through automation and easy-to-use platforms, helping STM societies and publishers manage their content more efficiently and deliver content to readers faster and more cost-effectively.
Developed in-house, River Valley’s proprietary platforms address the pain points felt by stakeholders, from researchers preparing their manuscripts to publishers requiring perfect XML. The system deals with all admin, allowing clients to focus on creating content.
River Valley was established in 1988 by Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of desktop publishing led him to start the company with the mission of delivering cutting edge solutions to academic publishers. Some 10 years ago, the company pioneered the first online authoring system and today boasts a number of publishing platforms, including: RVRite for collaborative authoring; ProofCheck for author proof checking; RVFormatter for automated conversion of XML to PDF; and ReView for intuitive peer review.
With Head Office in London and 3 offices in India, River Valley supports clients across EMEA, the USA and Asia. Clients include Cambridge University Press, The IET, De Gruyter, IOS Press, American Physical Society, The Sphere Association and IOP Publishing.
Contact:
Maryam Bazargan
Email: Maryam@rivervalleytechnologies.com
www.rivervalleytechnologies.com
About GigaScience
GigaScience is co-published by BGI and Oxford University Press. The journal covers research that uses or produces ‘big data’ from the full spectrum of the life sciences. It also serves as a forum for discussing the difficulties of and unique needs for handling large-scale data from all areas of the life sciences. The journal has a completely novel publication format – one that integrates manuscript publication with complete data hosting, and analysis tool incorporation. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research as well as to enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to GigaScience that all supporting data and source code be made available in the GigaScience database, GigaDB, as well as in publicly available repositories. GigaScience will provide users access to associated online tools and workflows, and has integrated a data analysis platform, maximizing the potential utility and re-use of data.
Contact:
Dr. Scott Edmunds
Executive Editor, GigaScience, BGI Hong Kong
Tel: +852 3610 3531
Cell: +852 9249 0853
Email: scott@gigasciencejournal.com
London, UK, 4 April 2018 \u2013 Authors of biology and biomedical papers can now choose to submit to a journal directly from bioRxiv, as well as submit to bioRxiv automatically from a journal, thanks to the \u201ctwo-way\u201d integration of River Valley\u2019s ReView platform with bioRxiv\u2019s systems. The automated acceptance of...
", "news_full_content": "River Valley announces two-way integration of its submission system, ReView, with the bioRxiv preprint server
London, UK, 4 April 2018 – Authors of biology and biomedical papers can now choose to submit to a journal directly from bioRxiv, as well as submit to bioRxiv automatically from a journal, thanks to the “two-way” integration of River Valley’s ReView platform with bioRxiv’s systems.
The automated acceptance of papers from bioRxiv (B2J) has already been available in ReView for some time. With the latest implementation (J2B), any publisher using ReView as their submission and peer review platform can opt to allow authors to submit their papers as a preprint to bioRxiv, simultaneously with submission to the journal, with no extra effort.
River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan said: “bioRxiv is one of the most popular preprint servers. ReView’s two-way integration simplifies submissions to and from bioRxiv. We have worked hand in hand with bioRxiv’s technical team to complete the integration.”
John Inglis, co-founder of bioRxiv said: “We are delighted that this most recent integration between submission systems extends the options available to authors of scientific papers. The transfer of manuscripts into and out of bioRxiv is an immensely popular feature of the server and it has been a pleasure to work with River Valley’s team to bring the underlying technologies to even more journals”.
Publishers using ReView have full control over this integration. ReView is already integrated with a wide range of external systems, most recently with CASRAI CRediT, allowing granular attribution of roles to authors.
[ends]
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of electronic publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVRite some 10 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the fundamental goal of speeding up scholarly communication.
River Valley’s vision is to streamline and to automate the publishing process through its suite of platforms, which include:
- RVRite (Collaborative online authoring and automated XML conversion)
- ReView (Intuitive submission and peer review platform)
- ProofCheck (Online author proofing system)
- RVFormatter (Automated XML to PDF converter)
River Valley continues to deliver the highest level of typesetting services to its publishing clients through the use of its cloud-based platforms.
River Valley’s clients include Cambridge University Press, The IET, De Gruyter, BMJ and IOP Publishing.
About bioRxiv
bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) (www.bioRxiv.org) is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution and supported by the Laboratory and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.
Contact:
Maryam Bazargan
Maryam@RiverValleyTechnologies.com
www.RiverValleyTechnologies.com
London, UK, 2 March 2018 \u2013 River Valley have developed a new feature within their peer review platform, ReView, to recognise peer reviewers\u2019 work. River Valley have worked closely with ORCID to allow reviewers who use the platform to update their ORCID records automatically with their reviews. Authors and peer reviewers...
", "news_full_content": "River Valley implements ORCID to give credit to reviewers
London, UK, 2 March 2018 – River Valley have developed a new feature within their peer review platform, ReView, to recognise peer reviewers’ work. River Valley have worked closely with ORCID to allow reviewers who use the platform to update their ORCID records automatically with their reviews. Authors and peer reviewers have always been able to log in to ReView with their ORCID records. However, this new feature will give peer reviewers the additional facility to link their reviews back to ORCID.
Once they have linked their ORCID IDs to ReView, they can simply give explicit permission for the review details to be uploaded. River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan said: “Academic peer reviewers work tirelessly behind the scenes, usually anonymously, to keep the wheels of publishing in motion. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with ORCID’s highly professional team to do our part in allowing more recognition for reviewers. We look forward to even closer integration with ORCID in the near future.”
Alice Meadows, Director of Community Engagement & Support at ORCID, said: “The implementation of ORCID’s review functionality in River Valley’s platform gives reviewers an easy way to get credit for their work, while retaining full control of what they want uploaded to ORCID. Thanks to River Valley for setting up this integration.”
The details of the data uploaded to ORCID can be as explicit and as granular as the journal policy allows, from fully open reviews, with the content uploaded, to highly restrictive double blind reviews where only high-level details are published.
ReView gives the author the choice as to whether to upload a particular review or not, and they can retrospectively decide to add or to delete any reviews in their ORCID record.
[ends]
About River Valley Technologies River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of electronic publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVRite some 10 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the fundamental goal of speeding up scholarly communication. River Valley’s vision is to streamline and to automate the publishing process through its suite of platforms, which include:
- RVRite (Collaborative online authoring and automated XML conversion)
- ReView (Intuitive submission and peer review platform)
- ProofCheck (Online author proofing system)
- RVFormatter (Automated XML to PDF converter)
River Valley continues to deliver the highest level of typesetting services to its publishing clients through the use of its cloud-based platforms.
River Valley’s clients include:
Cambridge University Press, The IET, De Gruyter, BMJ and IOP Publishing.
Contact
Maryam Bazargan
Maryam@RiverValleyTechnologies.com
www.RiverValleyTechnologies.com
London, UK, 21 November 2017 \u2013 Edinburgh University Press has become the latest prestigious publisher to sign up to ReView, River Valley\u2019s submission and peer review system, in a bid to reduce admin and turnaround times on their journals. Sarah McDonald, Head of Journals at EUP, said: \u201cReView was intuitive...
", "news_full_content": "Edinburgh University Press to use River Valley’s ReView for submission and peer review in journals
London, UK, 21 November 2017 – Edinburgh University Press has become the latest prestigious publisher to sign up to ReView, River Valley’s submission and peer review system, in a bid to reduce admin and turnaround times on their journals.
Sarah McDonald, Head of Journals at EUP, said: “ReView was intuitive and easy to use whilst delivering complex workflows and full security. Being able to handle any text including Arabic, ReView provided the perfect solution for us. River Valley were great at working with us to refine our workflows and to apply the innovative features of ReView.”
ReView is a revolutionary peer review system. Built from the ground up using the latest web technologies, it is delivered as a single, nimble installation, whether you have 2 or 2000 journals. Books and conference series can also be handled within the same installation, giving publishers more control over the content.
The reporting engine in ReView is powerful yet simple to use. Although ReView ships with a set of standard reports, any number of new reports can be generated within minutes, giving publishers unparalleled control over their publications, usually with no need for extra training. It can be tuned to generate the precise requirements of a publisher for one, several, or all journals, and to email them automatically at regular intervals.
The “responsive” design of ReView means it is fully usable on tablets, or even mobile phones. We are pleased to report that one journal manager is quite happy making changes to complex journal workflows, using ReView’s graphical workflow manager on an iPhone!
“More and more publishers are finding ReView delivers the perfect peer review solution for them. We look forward to working with Edinburgh University Press.” said River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan.
ReView has quickly become the leading new peer review system with tremendous feedback from authors, reviewers and publishers alike. The IET and the BMJ also announced partnerships with ReView earlier in 2017.
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of electronic publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVRite some 10 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the fundamental goal of speeding up scholarly communication.
River Valley’s vision is to streamline and to automate the publishing process through its RVPublisher suite of platforms, which include:
- MagicWord and MagicTeX (Manuscript to XML conversion)
- RVRite (Collaborative online authoring)
- ReView (Intuitive submission and peer review platform)
- ProofCheck (Online author proofing system)
- RVFormatter (Automated XML to PDF converter)
River Valley continues to deliver the highest level of typesetting services to its publishing clients through the use of its cloud-based platforms.
River Valley’s clients include Cambridge University Press, Nature Publishing Group, The IET, BMJ and IOP Publishing.
Contact
Maryam Bazargan
Maryam@RiverValleyTechnologies.com
www.RiverValleyTechnologies.com
London, UK, 12 October 2017 \u2013 BMJ, a leading medical knowledge provider, has adopted ReView, River Valley\u2019s submission and peer review system, for BMJ Open Science (http://openscience.bmj.com) The new journal applies open science principles to preclinical research, and incorporates several innovative features in peer review. Transparency and reproducibility are at...
", "news_full_content": "BMJ to use River Valley’s ReView for their new Open Science journal
London, UK, 12 October 2017 – BMJ, a leading medical knowledge provider, has adopted ReView, River Valley’s submission and peer review system, for BMJ Open Science (http://openscience.bmj.com) The new journal applies open science principles to preclinical research, and incorporates several innovative features in peer review.
Transparency and reproducibility are at the heart of BMJ Open Science. Not only are reviews published alongside accepted manuscripts, but even the discussions between reviewers are open to the public! This “extreme” openness is possible thanks to ReView’s flexible “discussion module” that is available to editors and reviewers throughout the review process.
Claire Rawlinson, Publisher at BMJ, said: “BMJ Open Science promotes open, transparent, and reproducible research. The requirements for the submission and peer review process are unusual and complex. We needed a system that was customisable and able to integrate easily with the many third-party initiatives that are important for open science. ReView’s flexibility to adapt has allowed us to configure it to our precise requirements.”
Amongst the features included for BMJ Open Science are River Valley’s latest reporting module that literally needs no training, the facility for direct submission of preprints from bioRxiv, and a configurable implementation of CASRAI’s CRediT authorship taxonomy, giving authors granular recognition for their contribution.
River Valley’s CTO, Kaveh Bazargan, said: “We built ReView from the ground up using the latest web technologies, ensuring maximum flexibility and usability. We are proud to be working with BMJ’s dynamic team and to be meeting the challenges posed by their exciting new journal.”
[ends]
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of electronic publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge composition and technology to academic publishers. The company remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVRite some 10 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the fundamental goal of speeding up scholarly communication.
River Valley’s vision is to streamline and to automate the publishing process through its suite of platforms, which include:
- MagicWord and MagicTeX (Manuscript to XML conversion)
- RVRite (Collaborative online authoring)
- ReView (Intuitive submission and peer review platform)
- ProofCheck (Online author proofing system)
- RVFormatter (Automated XML to PDF converter)
River Valley continues to deliver highest level of typesetting services to its publishing clients through the use of its cloud-based platforms.
River Valley’s clients include Cambridge University Press, Nature Publishing Group, The IET, and IOP Publishing.
Contact
Maryam Bazargan
Maryam@RiverValleyTechnologies.com
www.RiverValleyTechnologies.com
London, UK, 31 July, 2017 \u2013 After evaluating several competing products in 2016, De Gruyter, one of the world\u2019s leading journal publishers, has chosen River Valley\u2019s online proofing platform, ProofCheck. Like many other publishers, De Gruyter had been sending authors their proofs in PDF format for annotation. Authors\u2019 corrections would...
", "news_full_content": "De Gruyter streamlines author proofing by using River Valley’s ProofCheck system
London, UK, 31 July, 2017 – After evaluating several competing products in 2016, De Gruyter, one of the world’s leading journal publishers, has chosen River Valley’s online proofing platform, ProofCheck.
Like many other publishers, De Gruyter had been sending authors their proofs in PDF format for annotation. Authors’ corrections would then be implemented to produce the final publication. De Gruyter was looking for a faster and more reliable system in order to minimise admin within the publication workflows of their online-only journals.
ProofCheck is the result of the application of River Valley’s thorough knowledge of the publishing market and production requirements for almost 30 years, coupled with some 10 years of experience in development of online publishing platforms. ProofCheck makes the process of proof correction easier and faster for the author, the publisher, and the production vendor. Authors can make corrections to proofs as well as answer any editor queries using a browser, and without the need to download any files. They use an HTML interface, but are in fact editing the XML in real time. Production editors can then simply accepts or reject changes, and the corrected XML is automatically sent back to De Gruyter’s vendor to produce the final publication.
Collaborating closely with De Gruyter’s specialist staff, River Valley’s developers ensured that every type of content was catered for, including complex math, graphics and tables. ProofCheck tracks all changes using an innovative content tracker, so De Gruyter staff can see who made a change and when.
Franziska Buehring, Senior Manager Production Standards and Solutions at De Gruyter, said: “ProofCheck improves the authors’ experience at the critical stage of correction. Because the content is saved as XML at all times, the accuracy of the archived XML was also increased. We are confident that this solution allows us to better serve the needs of our authors.”
River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan said: “It has been a pleasure to work with the knowledgeable staff of De Gruyter who have been just as particular about the quality of the content and the user interface as River Valley’s developers and UX designers. We look forward to a long relationship with De Gruyter.”
[ends]
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of desktop publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVRite some 10 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the fundamental goal of speeding up scholarly communication.
River Valley’s vision is to automate the publishing process through the RVPublisher suite of platforms that includes MagicWord and MagicTeX (Manuscript to XML conversion), RVRite (Collaborative online authoring), ReView (intuitive peer review platform), ProofCheck (online author proofing system), and RVFormatter (automated PDF generator).
River Valley’s clients include Cambridge University Press, Nature Publishing Group, The IET and IOP Publishing.
For more information, visit: www.RiverValleyTechnologies.com
About De Gruyter
De Gruyter publishes first-class scholarship and has done so for more than 260 years. An international, independent publisher headquartered in Berlin — and with further offices in Boston, Beijing, Basel, Vienna, Warsaw and Munich — it publishes over 1,300 new book titles each year and more than 800 journals in the humanities, social sciences, medicine, mathematics, engineering, computer sciences, natural sciences, and law.
The publishing house also offers a wide range of digital media, including open access journals and books. The group includes the imprints De Gruyter Akademie Forschung, Birkhäuser, De Gruyter Mouton, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, De Gruyter Open, De Gruyter Saur and De|G Press. For more information, visit: www.degruyter.com
Contact
Maryam Bazargan
Maryam@RiverValleyTechnologies.com
London, UK, 1 Feb 2017 \u2013 The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), one of the world\u2019s largest engineering institutions, has adopted River Valley\u2019s \u201cReView\u201d, the nimble and innovative manuscript submission and peer review system, for all their journals. The IET, who had been using ScholarOne for many years, will...
", "news_full_content": "IET adopt River Valley’s ReView as their journal submission and peer review platform
London, UK, 1 Feb 2017 – The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), one of the world’s largest engineering institutions, has adopted River Valley’s “ReView”, the nimble and innovative manuscript submission and peer review system, for all their journals. The IET, who had been using ScholarOne for many years, will transition all their journals to ReView over the coming months.
The IET were looking for a flexible, easy to use and cost effective peer review platform capable of handling the peer review of multiple content formats including books, conference papers as well as journal articles, on the same platform. Flexible reporting across multiple content types was also a key requirement.
Following a competitive bid held by the IET in 2016, River Valley Technologies are proud to announce that ReView was judged to be the best candidate for the task! Built using state of the art web technologies, ReView has some truly unique features. It is fully functional on any device including mobile phones, and can be used by all parties with little or no “user instructions”. Using innovative technologies developed in-house, administrators can create and modify workflows of any complexity using a graphical interface, create as many user roles as needed, create new journals in a matter of minutes and cascade manuscripts from one journal to another by simply selecting the title from a drop down menu.
ReView is designed to give publishers complete and intuitive control over their content. All content is hosted in a single installation and so any report, including interactive graphical reports, can be generated instantaneously, be it for one journal, a group of journals, or for all publications.
Sara Sharman, Head of Content Services at the IET said: “ReView’s refreshingly simple user interface, combined with River Valley’s intimate knowledge of scholarly content, gave us the confidence to choose River Valley over the competition.”
River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan said: “Yet again it has been a pleasure to work with The IET. Our mission is to minimise admin and simplify the working process for all stakeholders. We are confident that the benefits of a single, nimble installation for all content using state of the art web technologies will make it a pleasure for authors, reviewers, and The IET’s admin staff.
River Valley are, of course, no strangers to The IET. In 2016 The IET implemented a new “Registration Process System”, using a highly customised version of ReView, thus proving the unparalleled flexibility of the platform.
——
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of desktop publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley’s vision is to automate the publishing process through the RVPublisher suite of platforms that includes MagicWord, RVRite, ReView, ProofCheck, and RVFormatter. River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVPublisher some 10 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the primary aim of speeding up scholarly communication.
River Valley’s clients include De Gruyter, Cambridge University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and IOP Publishing.
About the IET
The IET is one of the world’s largest engineering institutions with over 167,000 members in 150 countries. It is also the most interdisciplinary – to reflect the increasingly diverse nature of engineering in the 21st century. Energy, transport, manufacturing, information and communications, and the built environment: the IET covers them all. The IET is working to engineer a better world by inspiring, informing and influencing our members, engineers and technicians, and all those who are touched by, or touch, the work of engineers.
London, UK, 11 October, 2016 \u2013 The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), one of the world\u2019s largest engineering institutions, is launching a new system for managing professional registration applications, such as Chartered Engineer and Incorporated Engineer. The IET grants these registrations on behalf of the Engineering Council UK, after...
", "news_full_content": "IET opts for River Valley’s ReView platform for member management
London, UK, 11 October, 2016 – The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), one of the world’s largest engineering institutions, is launching a new system for managing professional registration applications, such as Chartered Engineer and Incorporated Engineer. The IET grants these registrations on behalf of the Engineering Council UK, after a detailed assessment process of each applicant. With over 167,000 members, the process is heavy on administration.
The IET approached 10 companies, including River Valley, to bid in building a system to manage the assessment and interview process and to minimise administration. Somewhat to the surprise of IET, it turned out that the winning bid was a solution that already existed, and that could be configured to their precise needs, namely ReView, River Valley’s peer review platform. River Valley recognised that although the requirements for the project were unrelated to journal peer review, the process was in fact simply a highly specialised form of peer review. There were many complications and intricacies, such as reviewers having to be automatically chosen by their speciality, and having to be grouped into “panels”, including face-to-face meetings.
One by one, each requirement for the system was incorporated by River Valley’s programmers, resulting in a nimble, user-friendly platform. Built using the latest web programming technologies, the system is “responsive”, with full functionality on tablets and mobiles. Instructions were provided, but most users commented that they had not needed to refer to them! River Valley’s high level of data security was of course essential in the project.
Michelle Richmond, Director of Membership & Professional Development at the IET said: “River Valley fully understood our requirements for the project, and configured their systems to the precise needs of the IET.”
River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan said: “The IET project was a challenge, but it was a chance to prove the flexibility of ReView and how it could adapt to just about any role-based process, ranging from classic journal peer review to contract management. It has been a pleasure to work with the experts at the IET to deliver a fully customised system to help save time and deliver efficiencies.”
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of desktop publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.
River Valley’s vision is to automate the publishing process through the RVPublisher platform that includes RVRite, ReView, ProofCheck, and RVFormatter. River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVPublisher some 9 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the primary aim of speeding up scholarly communication.
River Valley’s clients include Cambridge University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and IOP Publishing.
About the IET
The IET is one of the world’s largest engineering institutions with over 167,000 members in 150 countries. It is also the most interdisciplinary – to reflect the increasingly diverse nature of engineering in the 21st century. Energy, transport, manufacturing, information and communications, and the built environment: the IET covers them all. The IET is working to engineer a better world by inspiring, informing and influencing our members, engineers and technicians, and all those who are touched by, or touch, the work of engineers.
London, UK, 7 April, 2016 \u2013 RVPublisher, launched end of 2014, is the innovative end-to-end production platform set to revolutionize scholarly publishing. The system is a \u201cpure\u201d XML based end-to-end publishing platform, comprising several modules that link seamlessly \u2013 from online collaborative authoring to peer review, proof checking, automated pagination,...
", "news_full_content": "American Physical Society adopts River Valley’s automated publishing platform for rapid publications
London, UK, 7 April, 2016 – RVPublisher, launched end of 2014, is the innovative end-to-end production platform set to revolutionize scholarly publishing. The system is a “pure” XML based end-to-end publishing platform, comprising several modules that link seamlessly – from online collaborative authoring to peer review, proof checking, automated pagination, and delivery. The system is set to reduce publication costs and turn-around times for publishers by up to 70%.
RVPublisher’s user friendly collaborative authoring module saves all content natively in XML right from the start. Subsequent stages such as peer review, copy editing and proof correction are all carried out directly on the XML file but using a familiar WYSIWYG interface. An integrated version control system keeps track of the complete editing history.
The American Physical Society (APS) has adopted the full suite of RVPublisher modules for its online publication, Physics. The system, especially configured by River Valley, has the following unique advantages for APS:
- Decide the precise time of publication, without the need for an external typesetting vendor.
- Any late changes can be entered into the system and the XML and PDF generated and published in a matter of seconds.
- Journal editor can accept or reject any editorial changes, with confidence that all textual changes (and the name of the operator making the change) are clearly highlighted.
- Images and even videos can be imported at multiple resolutions.
Mark Doyle, Chief Information Officer at the APS said: “RVPublisher is a sophisticated XML/MathML content editing system that allows the editorial staff of Physics to rapidly create, update, and publish articles with a push of a button while maintaining tight deadlines and without concern about the underlying markup. Working with RVT, we have been able to finely tailor the system to our very specific technical requirements and worklfow.”
The pagination module within RVPublisher (RVFormatter) allows for a manuscript or book to be instantly published as HTML, PDF and Epub (and even Word!) at any stage in the process. Resultant PDFs can be a standard file, or one of River Valley’s unique “Smart PDFs” allowing optional information to appear when the user hovers the mouse over relevant links.
River Valley’s 500 man-years’ experience with handling mathematics has been incorporated into RVPublisher in order to ensure that it is a comfortable environment even for authors writing mathematics. Authors can even enter math content by using LaTeX commands directly. In the XML file, the mathematics is then seamlessly converted to MathML, using sophisticated conversion filters which can even encode subtle math spacing. Graphics are saved in different resolutions, and automatically chosen for different outputs. Vector images remain as vector throughout the process and are not “rasterized”.
The content can be exported as XML at any point in the process. The XML can be written to conform to any DTD, e.g. JATS. For publishers who prefer to use a conventional pagination vendor, this XML can be ingested directly into most typesetters’ pagination systems.
Kaveh Bazargan, CTO of River Valley Technologies said: “Our partnership with APS has allowed us to put RVPublisher through its paces and to ensure that the most complex scholarly material including mathematics is handled with full automation. We look forward to continuing to push the boundaries through our close cooperation with APS.”
— Ends —
About River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of desktop publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. Some 27 years later, the company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of typesetting and publishing technology.
River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace authoring “in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVPublisher some 8 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, including a major new initiative of “structured graphics” where illustrations in publications are linked to the main text, and not simply placed as separate items.
River Valley clients include Cambridge University Press, IOP Publishing and The Institution of Engineering and Technology
For further information contact:
Kaveh Bazargan
Kaveh@rivervalleytechnologies.com
www.rivervalleytechnologies.com
London, UK, 2 December, 2014 \u2013 River Valley Technologies, the 25 year old UK-based typesetting company is set to cut production costs and turn around times by half for publishers, by using its new RVPublisher platform. The system is a \u201cpure\u201d XML based end-to-end collaborative authoring and composition solution, comprising...
", "news_full_content": "River Valley cuts the cost of typesetting by half
London, UK, 2 December, 2014 – River Valley Technologies, the 25 year old UK-based typesetting company is set to cut production costs and turn around times by half for publishers, by using its new RVPublisher platform. The system is a “pure” XML based end-to-end collaborative authoring and composition solution, comprising several modules that link seamlessly.
River Valley’s system includes a user friendly collaborative authoring environment that saves all content natively in XML. Subsequent stages such as peer review, copy editing and proof correction are all carried out directly on the XML file using a user-friendly WYSIWYG interface. An integrated version control system keeps track of the complete editing history.
The rendering module within RVPublisher allows for the manuscript to be instantly published as HTML, PDF and Epub at any stage in the process, e.g. directly upon submission as a preprint, upon acceptance, or immediately after proof correction. The automatically generated PDF can be a standard one, or one of of River Valley’s unique “Smart PDFs” allowing optional information to appear when the user hovers the mouse over relevant links.
River Valley’s 500 man-years’ experience with handling mathematics has been incorporated into RVPublisher in order to ensure that it is a comfortable environment even for authors writing mathematics. Authors can enter math content either by using LaTeX commands, or by using a WYSIWYG interface. In the XML file, the mathematics is then seamlessly converted to MathML, using sophisticated conversion filters which can even encode subtle math spacing. Complex math constructs that have no MathML equivalent are automatically detected and saved in the native LaTeX format. Graphics are saved in the most appropriate form, and only downsampled when required. Vector images remain as vector throughout the process and are not “rasterized”.
The content can be exported as XML at any point in the process. The XML can be written to conform to any DTD, e.g. JATS, and can be ingested directly into most typesetters’ pagination system. In addition, the system can generate LaTeX files, conforming to any of a number of publisher “class files”. This allows authors to submit LaTeX files to journals, without using any LaTeX coding.
More and more publishers are looking to reduce publication turn-around times and even to move to “instant” publishing. RVPublisher will allow them to do this without compromising quality and without a need to change suppliers.
River Valley has already been using some of the modules of RVPublisher internally to deliver work for its current clients.
– Ends –
London, UK, 15 September, 2014 \u2013 River Valley Technologies, the leading providers of LaTeX and XML-first typesetting are turning the industry on its head by launching a completely automated XML-based publishing system, RVPublisher. The system is made up of several standalone \u201cmodules\u201d that interconnect seamlessly. These include RVRite (River Valley\u2019s...
", "news_full_content": "River Valley Technologies to launch automated XML publishing
London, UK, 15 September, 2014 – River Valley Technologies, the leading providers of LaTeX and XML-first typesetting are turning the industry on its head by launching a completely automated XML-based publishing system, RVPublisher.
The system is made up of several standalone “modules” that interconnect seamlessly. These include RVRite (River Valley’s online XML authoring platform), ReView (an intuitive peer review system), RVEdit (River Valley’s copyediting platform), ProofCheck (an XML proof correction platform), VeRify (a user friendly XML checking system) and RVFormatter (a fully automated platform to convert XML to PDF or any other format).
The system will allow authors to create and submit valid XML files, using the RVRite online authoring platform. The publisher is then able to select the modules they wish the paper to go through, e.g. peer review or copyediting. Finally RVFormatter, River Valley’s automated XML converter will generate any required formats (e.g. PDF or Epub) at the press of a button.
River Valley Technologies’ Director, Kaveh Bazargan said: “We want to minimize the time to publication, and at the same time make it a pleasure for authors and publishers to guide manuscripts through the publication process.”
RVPublisher radically reduces the time to publication and will also allow Microsoft Word files to be published within 24 hours of acceptance. Later in 2015, the system will also deliver automated publishing for Word files.
River Valley’s Intuitive proof correction tool, ProofCheck (Sample text taken from a PeerJ article: https://peerj.com/articles/272/ under CCBY license)
VeRify, an intuitive XML tag checker from River Valley Technologies
(Sample text taken from a CUP article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/fms.2014.4 under CCBY license)
Online demos available upon request – please email info@rivervalleytechnologies.com
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