A publisher plays jazz with the intranet and Adobe Acrobat

Abstract

An all-electronic workflow containing text and art is an achievable goal for the production of a journal. The author highlights how a paper-intensive process to produce and print a journal was re-engineered to be a mostly electronic process, achieving both modernization and efficiency, while maintaining a backup paper process. Our solution focused on the usefulness of intermediate work products and the separation of the process itself from the supporting software technology. This resulted in a process that uses: (1) an intranet and the Internet to distribute intermediate work products among vendors, authors, reviewers, and the publisher; and (2) the Adobe Acrobat (tm) PDF format and supporting applications to view, annotate, print, and store intermediate work products that represent the text and art at various stages of each journal paper. This new process allows the generation of the many journal products that our customers request, such as paper versions and electronic versions in various formats.