Aries Systems Corporation

What is LiXuid Manuscript™?

Aries Systems’ LiXuid Manuscript™ innovation embodies our strategic vision for the future of scholarly publishing, in which XML is leveraged to streamline the entire publishing process. LiXuid Manuscript is a revolutionary feature comprised of a suite of XML workflow tools designed to work within Editorial Manager^® (EM) and ProduXion Manager^® (PM), Aries’ workflow management solutions. In the long-term, this multi-year, multi-phase initiative will enable XML-first workflows, creating a true-end-to-end solution.

The LiXuid Manuscript toolkit is currently under development and is being executed in three phases. The first phase, Article Submission, is already complete with the addition of Xtract, an automated metadata extraction tool that pre-populates submission fields for Authors upon submission to EM. This eliminates the need for Authors to rekey information in the system, streamlining the submission process. All LiXuid functionality (future and existing) will support our ultimate goal of transitioning unstructured representations of content (Word or PDF files) to structured, industry-compliant representations (JATS XML). Comprehensive XML workflows with the LiXuid toolkit can reduce costs, shorten time to publication, increase content accuracy and quality, and improve experience for all EM/PM users.

For more information on the development and release of upcoming LiXuid tools, see this recent presentation from our London User Group meeting.

Why is XML important to the publishing workflow?

XML is important to the publishing workflow because it separates the content from the format, and uses semantic tagging to structure that content. A single XML file can then be transformed into a variety of formats—HTML for online presentation, PDF, eBook, etc. Enhanced by industry-standard persistent identifiers for people, institutions, and online resources, the machine-readable tagging in XML makes discovering and searching articles quicker and more accurate.

For more on the basics of XML, and an update on LiXuid Manuscript functionality, join us for our upcoming Boston User Group Meeting on June 20-21st. .