April 30, 2004, North Andover, MA, USA – Aries Systems Corporation and The Sheridan Group announce the successful integration of Sheridan’s DigitalExpert image preflight technology with Aries’ Preprint Manager and Editorial Manager workflow management solutions.

Editorial Manager offers publishers and societies comprehensive Web-based manuscript submission and peer review workflow management. Preprint Manager further manages workflow from manuscript acceptance through electronic publication. While each product can be deployed independently, integration nodes between Editorial Manager and Preprint Manager allow peer review and production activities to occur in parallel. This leads to significantly shortened times between submission and publication, with consequent reductions in publication costs.

Poor image quality is a major factor contributing to increased delays and cost in the scholarly publishing process. Testing of images submitted by authors early in the publication process delivers substantial new benefits to publishers and to the scholarly community. DigitalExpert provides authors with a fast, easy-to-use tool that tests the publication suitability of each submitted image.

Integration of DigitalExpert with Preprint Manager provides authors with specific feedback on the quality of their image submissions along with useful recommendations about how to correct common problems. Authors are never prevented from submitting a manuscript, but receive constructive information to improve their submission preparation. Preprint Manager allows a journal office to specify image checking at different workflow trigger points such as initial submission, revision submission, and final acceptance. Additionally, image preflight results and recommendations can be communicated to authors using journal-configurable merge fields in the system’s e-mail function.

Doug Ehmann, Vice President and Chief Technology officer at The Sheridan Group, commented, “The degree to which DigitalExpert has been woven into the peer review workflow by Aries is impressive. The flexibility of the implementation will allow individual journals to tailor the image preflight experience according to their specific needs.” Richard Wynne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Aries, added, “We have heard from numerous scholarly publishers that DigitalExpert provides excellent preflight feedback, and we are delighted that we have been able to successfully integrate it into Preprint Manager workflows.” He added, “This is another example of how Editorial Manager and Preprint Manager deliver on the promise to reduce costs and time to publication, thereby enhancing the entire scholarly publishing process.”

About The Sheridan Group – The Sheridan Group (www.Sheridan.com) is a leading provider of a full range of printing and publication services to publishers, associations, and university presses. Headquartered in Hunt Valley, MD, The Sheridan Group includes the following companies: Capital City Press, in Montpelier, VT and The Sheridan Press, located in Hanover, PA, provide short-run sheet-fed scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journal printing and publication services. Dartmouth Journal Services, in Orford and Hanover, NH, provides long-run scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journal publication services. Dartmouth Printing Company, in Hanover, NH, provides a full range of short-run full web magazine and catalog print production and distribution. United Litho, Inc., in Ashburn, VA, provides short-run web magazine and catalog production services. Sheridan Books, Inc., in Ann Arbor and Chelsea, MI, and Fredericksburg, VA, offers short- to-medium-run web and sheet-fed book services from composition through print production, case binding, and distribution. Sheridan Reprints, in Hanover, PA, provides reprint services ranging from black and white to full-color, as well as marketing and author billing services. http://www.sheridan.com.

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.