Publishing Stages
Publishing Workflow
Assessment
This is the first process in which the manuscript is examined by an editor or the whole editorial team to see if it is publishable or not following DUP guidelines. When it is confirmed that the manuscript is publishable and henceforth accepted for publication, the client is informed and DUP decides whether the accepted manuscript needs an external reviewer or not. This process normally takes 1 day to 2 weeks.
Reviewing
If the manuscript needs an external reviewer, it is then sent to the anonymous reviewer – an expert in the field. Once a reviewer has assessed the work, s/he is supposed to write a report to the client guiding him/her on how to improve his/her manuscript. Upon the receipt of the reviewer’s comments and report, DUP editor in charge of the manuscript checks them and then submits both the report and the manuscript with the reviewer’s comments to the client on behalf of DUP after being given a go-ahead by the Manager. Immediately after working on the reviewer’s comments both in the report and the manuscript, the client is expected to send his/her work back to DUP for further publishing processes. The reviewer is normally given a maximum of two months from the date s/he received the manuscript.
As pointed out in (ii) above, once the client has worked on all the reviewer’s comments, his or her work enters into this editing stage. After the editing is completed, the manuscript is sent to the client with track changes. The client should accept all or at least 80% of the changes made to his/her manuscript and work on all comments given by the editor. Then s/he can submit the modified version back to DUP. Upon the satisfaction of the client’s modified version, the editor can pass the manuscript to the typesetter. Normally, the editor can work on 20 to 30 pages per day for substantive editing. Thus, editing a manuscript of 200 pages, for instance, can take 10 days or even a month to be accomplished because the editor needs to go back and forth for satisfaction before submitting the manuscript to the client.
This can be done at any publishing stage (at the beginning, middle or at the end). The designer works on this in collaboration with both the editor and the client. The design becomes complete only upon the agreement and satisfaction of the designer, editor and client. This can take a maximum of three days unless the client needs to change the design at the last stage. This might take a week.