Production Editor | Journal Manager | Copy-editor | Typesetter | Accepted Manuscript | DOI | Proofs | Version of Record | Supplementary material | Online First | Lyell Collection

Production Editor

If you’re an author of a chapter in one of our books your main point of contact once production is underway is one of our in-house Production Editors (PE). When your manuscript has been revised and accepted, it is the PE who will arrange the pre-editing, copy-editing and typesetting and send you a link to access the PDF proofs. The PE will deal with all your proof corrections and ensure that your article is published in our Online First area of the Lyell Collection as quickly and as accurately as possible. Subsequently, the PE will be responsible for all the stages involved in incorporating your single article into the finished book and publishing this both online and in hard copy. If you have any queries once your article has been accepted and moved into production, you should contact your PE. You will receive the PE’s contact details by email as soon as, or shortly after, your article comes into production.

Journal Manager

If you’re an author of an article in one of our journals, your main point of contact is the in-house Journal Manager (JM). Our JMs are responsible for overseeing the stages your article undergoes from initial submission through review, revision and acceptance to eventual publication. When your article has been revised and accepted, it is the JM who will arrange the pre-editing, copy-editing and typesetting and send you a link to access the PDF proofs. The JM will deal with all your proof corrections and ensure that your article is published as an Accepted Manuscript in the Lyell Collection as quickly and as accurately as possible. Subsequently, the JM will be responsible for all the stages involved in incorporating your single article into a complete issue of a journal and publishing this online. If you have any queries on your article, you should contact your JM. You will receive the JM’s contact details by email as soon as your article is submitted.

Copy-editor

We will assess and pre-edit and, in most cases, copy-edit your article before we typeset it into proof format. This is rarely done in-house, but by our small team of experienced UK-based freelance scientific copy-editors. They are well-versed in Geological Society house style and familiar with Earth science terminology. They will copy-edit your paper on screen as a Word file, using tracked changes so that we can see what has been amended. Don’t be concerned that we will re-write your paper or make major changes. You have already passed through a scientific peer-review process, so this is simply to check for such things as language, spelling errors, ensuring house style is implemented, that all references are complete, present and cited and that figures and tables are clear, present and cited in order. This is the stage at which most of your proof queries are generated.

Typesetter

Our typesetters will turn your copy-edited article into a set of proofs in the style of the journal to which you have submitted or in the style of the appropriate book series. They deal with all your artwork and will contact you directly if you have not uploaded high-resolution files with your initial submission. They are responsible for placing the figures and tables as close as possible to their first citations in the text (which is why it’s important that you always cite all figures and tables and cite them all in correct order) and applying the correct style to headings and other text elements. Their software checks all your references against text citations and introduces all the hyperlinks for references, figures and tables.

Accepted Manuscript

If you are the author of an article in one of our journals, within 1 week of acceptance of your article and if everything is in order, we will publish your paper as an Accepted Manuscript (AM). If you are the author of a chapter in one of our books, within 1 week of acceptance of your chapter, if everything is in order and if the book has sufficient number of chapters for us to be certain that we can publish a rounded book, we will publish your paper as an AM. You must have completed a license agreement and confirmed that you have permission to include any third-party content, if applicable, for us to do this. The AM is a water-marked PDF of your accepted text and original figures before we have begun copyediting or typesetting and will not look like the finished article. It will allow others to have rapid access to your research while we continue the production process.

DOI

As we move your paper into production and create the Accepted Manuscript, we assign a digital object identifier (DOI) to your article. We let you know the DOI as soon as possible so that you can use this in any subsequent citing of the article or in any promotion of your work. The DOI will remain with your article throughout its life and stay the same even if we have to correct anything and create a new version of your article after publication. GSL DOIs always begin with https://doi.org/10.1144/

Proofs

When we have pre-edited, copy-edited and typeset your article, we supply you with a link to access your proofs. These are PDF pages that look exactly how your article will look as a finished item. There is a cover sheet with some explanation about what we want you to do with these proofs and a list of numbered queries for you to resolve. We give you a deadline in which to read and comment on these proofs and can agree a revised date with you if the timeframe is not viable. At this point you should not try to re-write portions of your text. You should be spotting errors and answering queries. The Editor of your book will also have the opportunity to comment on and read these proofs and may send comments and queries to you during this period. These proofs are generally your only opportunity to proofread and view your article.

Version of Record

After you have seen and commented on your proofs and answered queries, we correct the proofs. Once we are satisfied that everything is fine, we publish your paper as the Version of Record (VoR). For books the VoR replaces the AM in Online First and for journals the VoR will be published in the issue in progress. The VoR is available in both html and PDF versions and the PDF will carry no page numbers. The official publication date of your article is the date that this VoR is published.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material can be any one of a number of things. Authors are increasingly encouraged to deposit any data associated with their articles in an appropriate publicly accessible repository. If you haven’t already done this, we can archive the data for you in our Figshare portal as Supplementary material. Reviewers of your article may have suggested taking out a peripheral data table from the main text and making it into a Supplementary material table. We can do this for you. You may want to provide more detailed methodology than the main text requires and we can make this available to interested readers as a Supplementary material item. You may have 3D videos of scanned material that we can deposit as Supplementary material. Whatever the material, we create metadata files and upload your files plus the metadata to our Figshare portal. We do not copy-edit your Supplementary material files at all; they publish as provided by you. The collection of files is given a DOI and we use this DOI to link out from your paper to your Supplementary material – every time it is mentioned in the text and in the short statement that describes your Supplementary material.

Online First

Online First is a feature offered through the Geological Society’s content platform, the Lyell Collection, enabling book articles to appear online soon after they have been accepted for publication and ahead of publication of the final volume. Once the book in which your article appears is complete, your paper moves from Online First into the appropriate Series section (e.g. Special Publications section) of the Lyell Collection, as part of a complete volume. 

Lyell Collection

The Lyell Collection is an online collection comprising the Society’s journal titles, Special Publications and key book series – plus journals published on behalf of other societies. Cutting-edge science sits alongside important historical material, all captured and presented to the highest electronic standards.


Remember – feel free to contact us if you have a query on your article that is in production.