April 17, 2015 North Andover, MA, USA – Aries Systems is a leading supplier of online submission and peer review workflow solutions for scholarly publishers. Aries’ principal offering, Editorial Manager, is used by more than 6,000 scholarly journals including many published in the fields of chemistry and materials science. For consideration by these journals, authors are often required to submit their crystallographic data files to the IUCr’s checkCIF system for validation. The Crystallographic Information File (CIF) is a standard text file format for representing crystallographic information promulgated by the IUCr. Managing this additional step manually can be inconvenient for authors and journal operations.

To address this need, Aries is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with the IUCr to integrate its checkCIF system with Editorial Manager. This means that CIF files will be automatically checked as a by-product of manuscript submission with the test results conveniently displayed to authors, reviewers and editors during journal submission and peer review workflows.

Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Aries commented “By integrating IUCr’s checkCIF, we can make life easier for authors because they don’t have to separately submit their CIF files for checking. The validation results are automatically captured in EM workflows so that they are appropriately displayed to editors and reviewers when evaluating the manuscript. We already provide options for automatic reference checking, image checking, and plagiarism checking, and this is a great addition to the suite of automated tools that journals can deploy within EM to improve the author submission experience and reduce time to publication.”

Peter Strickland, Executive Managing Editor at IUCr commented, “We’ve provided web-based checkCIF as a stand-alone solution for many years, and currently undertake about 1.2 million checks per year. The integration with Editorial Manager is a logical next step. It will be very convenient for authors, and will help journal offices evaluate the quality of submitted manuscripts.”

checkCIF integration will be released as part of Editorial Manager version 13.0 and will be in the hands of users in 2016.

About IUCr (www.iucr.org)
The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) is a scientific union adhering to the International Council for Science (ICSU). Its objectives are to promote international cooperation in crystallography and to contribute to all aspects of crystallography, to promote international publication of crystallographic research, to facilitate standardization of methods, units, nomenclatures and symbols, and to form a focus for the relations of crystallography to other sciences.

The IUCr fulfils its publication objectives by producing primary scientific journals and reference works such as International Tables for Crystallography.  IUCr Journals are the leading journals in their field and are produced to the highest quality standards. There are nine journals in total, two of which are Gold open access and the remainder hybrid open access titles. The IUCr has an International Editorial Board of approximately 170 Co-editors, who are based in academic institutions worldwide. All articles go through a rigorous peer review process, which is managed by the academic Co-editors.

The IUCr also manages and maintains the World Directory of Crystallographers, which is a database of professionals engaged in all areas of research related to X-ray crystallography.

About Aries (www.editorialmanager.com)
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.