November-December 2019 Newsletter

From A to XUG, it’s year-end news from Inera!

Staying ahead of predatory publishers

A vexing challenge in scholarly publishing today is what’s sometimes called “citation pollution”: citations to content from non-peer-reviewed, fraudulent, and/or “predatory” journals, hiding in plain sight in your authors’ reference lists. Predatory publishers play name games, adopting titles similar to or even flat-out hijacked from those of reputable journals. Abbreviated journal titles in references can make identifying fraudulent publications even trickier.

Many of us once relied on Beall’s List to distinguish legitimate journals from the other kind, but Beall’s List ceased publication in 2017, and free archived copies are becoming more outdated by the day. In addition, the list was controversial in its choices of which journals and publishers to include.

A current and more reliable alternative does exist: Cabells’ searchable databases of blacklisted and whitelisted journals, which are based on a transparent methodology and provide detailed violation reports. The Cabells blacklist currently includes more than 12,000 titles, with more under review! But even with access to a reliable list, reviewers and editors are unlikely to look up individual journal titles in references—with increasing pressure to publish quickly, there just isn’t time.

That’s where we come in! eXtyles and Edifix already use sophisticated data and processes to identify journal titles in references, and we’ve had multiple requests for tools to flag references to questionable publications. Inera plans to partner with Cabells to build this functionality into our software. In fact, we demonstrated a prototype at our recent eXtyles User Group meeting—and here’s an example of how it works:

eXtyles and Edifix customers and partners, we want to hear from you! Do you want this feature? If so, where in your workflow might you use it? Do you have questions or concerns about how it would work? Let us know at [email protected], and stay tuned for updates.

Looking back at #XUGXV

Thanks to everyone who participated in making our 15th annual eXtyles User Group meeting a big success!

Read all about the meeting in our annual XUG wrap-up blog post or check out individual slide presentations.

A new BITS is coming! Have your say

The BITS Working Group is about to reconvene! If you have comments or suggestions for the next version of the BITS DTD, now’s the time to get in touch. You can contact the Working Group via the JATS discussion list.

New customer spotlight

This month we’re shining the spotlight on new eXtyles customer Brepols!

Founded in 1796, Brepols is an international academic publisher of works in the humanities. Brepols’ mission is to publish print and online books and journals with an outstanding academic reputation in the fields of history, archaeology, languages and literature, music, and art. They also publish leading online bibliographic search tools and indispensable full-text databases.

Inera staff news

In early November—just before XUG—we welcomed Mike Dean to the Inera team!

Mike is a seven-year veteran of eXtyles, having used it to produce financial journal and book content. As a Solutions Architect at Inera, he’ll be helping customers with support queries, working on eXtyles configuration projects, and assisting the development team.

Updating eXtyles markup for JATS4R

We’re updating our eXtyles NLM product to help customers comply with recent recommendations for markup of ethics statements and data availability statements in journal articles from NISO’s JATS for Reuse (JATS4R) Working Group. For all the details, check out our blog post !

If you use eXtyles NLM, you’ll get this update automatically. If you are exporting JATS from a customized version of eXtyles and would like to get this update, please let us know.

Find Inera at upcoming conferences

Atypon Engage Europe 2019

London, UK, December 6

Are you a Literatum user? Look for Senior Solutions Architect Robin Dunford at this year’s Engage Europe conference in London.

EEMUG 2020

London, UK, January 23–24

Robin Dunford will also be attending this year’s European Editorial Manager User Group meeting.

Working with Word

Word Tip: Making Draft View even more useful

On the View tab, Word offers several ways to look at your document. You may spend most of your time in Print Layout view, but other options have a lot to offer! Previously on Word Tips, we’ve discussed the very useful Outline View; this time, we’ll focus on Draft view.

Draft view can be useful in several ways. First, as you’ll remember if you’ve had eXtyles User Training, it’s the easiest way to quickly review which paragraph styles are used in your document:

Draft view can also speed up load time and reduce display glitches for large files, since its pared-down display (no headers and footers, no images) takes up less working memory. This view preserves line and page breaks but displays them in a space-saving way.

By default, Draft view uses 100% zoom and the same fonts, colors, and sizes as Page Layout view, which means you may find the font in Draft View smaller than you’d like. As in Page Layout, you can adjust the zoom in Draft view. However, you can also set up Draft view to always use the font and font size of your choice! Here’s how:

    • Open File > Options > Advanced
    • Under Show Document Content, check the Use draft font in Draft and Outline view box:

  • Choose the font and type size you prefer
  • Click OK

This is also a helpful trick if you have a preferred font for editing that doesn’t match those used in your document templates: by setting up Draft view to display that font, you can have a version tailored to your preferences available in one click, without changing the underlying format of your documents.

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

Happy New Year! ???????? We’ll see you in 2020!

The Inera offices will be closed December 24 through January 1.