January 7, 2005, North Andover, MA, USA – Aries Systems Corporation is pleased to announce the release of Editorial Manager version 3.1, which delivers important new peer review workflow management capabilities to the scholarly publishing community:

• Conference Submissions: A new tool that facilitates the submission, processing and extraction of conference submissions. This allows publishers to use either their existing journal submission site, or an additional submission site with linked user databases, to process conference abstracts and proceedings.
• Journal Office Enhancements: Journal office options now include the ability to require authors to respond to journal-configurable submission questions, and the ability to configure HTML email letters that include journal branding.
• Enhancement of the Editorial Manager Data Storage System: While the upgrade to the new data storage architecture will be transparent to users, it will greatly improve the performance of the Editorial Manager database, and also provide greater efficiency in back-up and restore procedures.

The new release will be provided free of charge to existing Editorial Manager customers and rollout will be coordinated to avoid any disruption of day-to-day journal office operations.

Commenting on the new release, Tony Alves, Product Manager for Editorial Manager, said, “Enhancements in the 3.1 release make it easy to process conference submissions using Editorial Manager. For example, accepted conference abstracts can be manipulated and ranked into publication order, and exported from the system in a structured format for onward reproduction on CD-ROM, in print or the Web. Although many of the other technology enhancements in Editorial Manager will be invisible to users, they are part of the substantial, ongoing infrastructure upgrade investment required to retain market leadership with this type of content management application.”

Aries’ ability to deliver frequent, feature-rich new releases and to seamlessly upgrade users has played a major part in attracting new customers. In addition to the recently announced enterprise agreement with Springer SBM, Editorial Manager has been chosen by several new journals and scholarly societies, including the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the American Animal Hospital Association, Duke University Press, the Canadian Academic Accounting Association, the Veterinary Dermatology journal (published by Blackwell), the Quarterly Journal of Medicine (published by Oxford University Press), Lifelines and the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecological and Neonatal Nursing (both published by Sage Publications).

Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, said, “Scholarly journals are rightly concerned about not just having the best system this year, but also about having the best system every year. The practical expectations of authors, reviewers and editors are growing so quickly that only vendors with a proven ability to rapidly deploy new functionality to their entire user base will remain competitive.”

About Aries
Aries Systems transforms the way scholarly publishers bring high-value content to the world. The company’s innovative and forward-looking workflow solutions manage the complexities of modern print and electronic publishing – from submission, to editorial management and peer review, to production tracking and publishing channel distribution. As the publishing environment evolves, Aries Systems is committed to delivering solutions that help publishers and scholars enhance the discovery and dissemination of human knowledge. Publish faster, publish smarter, with Aries Systems.