Step into summer with spotlights, events, new arrivals, and more!

It’s not too early to start planning for XUG …

We’re transitioning out of conference season to planning our own annual event, the eXtyles User Group meeting. Save the date! XUG will take place on Thursday, November 7, at the Revere Hotel Boston Common. Guest rooms are now available at our special room rate of $259/night.

This year marks XUG’s 15th anniversary, and we hope to see you all there!

Reserve your room today!

Spring conference wrap-up

As the busy season of spring publishing events draws to a close, we look back on the events we attended in the second half of May: JATS-Con 2019 and the 41st Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

Why XML is the key: JATS-Con 2019

Last month Robin Dunford, our Senior Solutions Consultant, attended the first JATS-Con ever held in the UK. The meeting featured updates from JATS-adjacent initiatives JATS4R and MECA (the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach), as well as perspectives from the Optical Society of America and bioRxiv on using the JATS family to handle “non-traditional” content such as conference proceedings and preprints. Robin also reports that the new location attracted many new faces: about two-thirds of the 130 attendees were at JATS-Con for the first time!

While Tommie Usdin was unfortunately absent, fellow JATS-Con legend Jeff Beck stepped in to close the conference by reprising his highly entertaining cautionary tale “Beware! The Spork,” which warns against losing sight of what customers need and instead settling for what makes customers not too unhappy.

Preliminary proceedings for JATS-Con 2019 are available from NCBI.

Sun, sea, and SSP

At the end of May, Liz Blake, our Director of Business Development, and Marketing Manager Sylvia Izzo Hunter represented Inera at the 41st SSP Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. (This is the farthest south the SSP Annual Meeting has ever been, and the weather was lovely!) Liz and Sylvia enjoyed catching up with a variety of customers and partners, as well as making some new acquaintances.

Highlights of the meeting included two thought-provoking keynote addresses. The first, by Dr. Mariamawit Yeshak of Addis Ababa University, opened a window on the challenges and possibilities of scholarly research and publishing in sub-Saharan Africa—a region with which many SSP members remain unfamiliar. The second, by Betsy Beaumon of Benetech, invited attendees to consider the ways in which digital technologies can help us to create a more accessible and inclusive world; how creators of digital content can make sure that their “born digital” content is also “born accessible”; and how a more inclusive and accessible world benefits all of us.

Another highlight was “Achieving Standards Nirvana,” a session focusing on standards and interoperability in which panelists were joined by volunteers from the audience (including Sylvia, who played a knowledge base provider) for an experiential look at what it’s really like to participate in a NISO working group. It’s not easy to make the last session of a long conference day lively and interactive, and it was clear that everyone left this one with a better appreciation of what goes into creating the standards we all use every day.

The new PubMed is coming!

At the Medical Library Association conference in May, Kathi Canese and Marie Collins of the National Library of Medicine presented the annual PubMed review. Some quick facts:

• PubMed is currently approaching 30 million entries!
• Of these, only 770,000 currently include ORCID iDs for author disambiguation; authors should be encouraged to include their ORCIDs. (Getting ORCIDs
  already? Keep them authentic!)
• For 97% of journals indexed in PubMed, the publisher is actively updating and correcting citation metadata.
• The PubMed team is currently moving LinkOut to a new, more sustainable model.

By far the most exciting part of the talk was a detailed overview of the new and improved PubMed, currently in development as “PubMed Labs” and due to move to production in September 2019. There’s a lot more going on than we could possibly summarize here, so we encourage you to check out the original talk! You can watch the whole thing here, or download the slides and read the transcript.

Inera team news

In April we welcomed Roman Matveev to our QA team. As QA Specialist, Roman coordinates Inera product testing, working closely with the Development team to make sure that our software passes rigorous test cycles, as well as orchestrating configuration and automation of Inera’s internal tools infrastructure.

Welcome aboard, Roman!

eXtyles feature spotlight: The Insert Symbols menu

This month we’re highlighting a helpful but often under-used eXtyles feature: the Insert Symbols Menu. Located on the far left of the eXtyles tab, Insert Symbols makes inserting accented letters and special characters easier than with the native Word interface, in much the same way as the Paragraph Styling Palette does for applying styles.

See eXtyles Insert Symbols in action in this video! And if the default Insert Symbols menu is missing a symbol you need, contact eXtyles Support to discuss adding it.

Find Inera at upcoming conferences

► EMUG 2019

Boston, MA, June 20 & 21

President Irina Golfman and Director of Development William Fox will be attending the 17th annual Editorial Manager and ProduXion Manager User Group Meeting.

► Frankfurt Book Fair

Frankfurt, Germany, October 16–18

CEO Bruce Rosenblum and Senior Solutions Consultant Robin Dunford will represent Inera at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

► XUG 2019

Boston, MA, November 7

SAVE THE DATE for the 15th annual XUG at the Revere Hotel in downtown Boston.

 

 

Attending one of these events? We’d love to see you! Please contact us if you’d like to schedule a meeting.

Working with Word

Word Tip: Bypassing the Start screen in Word 2016

One feature of Word 2016 that some users probably like but many of us find unhelpful is the Start Screen that pops up when you launch Word:

If you’ve had enough of the Start Screen, here’s how to turn it off:

• From within Word, go to File > Options > Start-up Options.
• Find the Show the Start screen when this application starts checkbox.
• Uncheck the box.
• Click OK.

This will restore what used to be the default behavior in previous versions of Word: when you open Word, you’ll go straight to a new blank document.

Have an intractable Word problem you’d love to solve? Have a clever tip to share? Send it to us at [email protected]!