NIH RFI: NIH – Manuscript Submission and Tracking System

The flow of new manuscripts is vital to the life of a journals publishing program. Without content, a publication cannot succeed. The manuscript submission and tracking system is the first interface that an author is presented with once they have decided to submit to the journal, so it is critical that they have a positive user experience. Likewise, the journal staff and its contractors must interface with this system on a daily basis to keep work moving between the editorial office, the Deputy Editors, the Associate Editors, Reviewers, and the authors themselves. Any breakdowns or inefficiencies will be felt by a vast number of parties and could delay the sensitive metric of time to publication.

The following technical requirements must be met in order for the system to be considered for use by EHP Publishing journals. Any systems that do not substantively meet these requirements will not be considered for use.

1. The system shall accept manuscripts in both Microsoft Word and TeX (LaTeX and RevTeX, for example, and their associated BibTex and style files) formats and successfully build them into a preview PDF with other file formats automatically.
   1. The system shall accept a wide variety of figure file formats, including PDF, TIFF, EPS, BMP, PNG, and JPG, and shall successfully build them into a preview PDF with the manuscript and other file formats automatically. Figures shall not be automatically resaved or converted to any other formats; they must be made available to EHP Publishing in the format originally uploaded by the author.
   2. The system shall accept supplemental material uploads from authors: these will include text documents, figures, tables, video, audio, and data sets, among others. There shall be no restrictions on the file types that authors can provide, but EHP and JHP shall be able to restrict file types as it chooses for certain types of uploads. These materials shall also be accessible to all Editors and Reviewers during the peer review process.
   3. The system shall have the ability for journals to build custom submission questions and fields for authors, and to make changes to these questions directly without intervention from the provider’s technical support staff.
   4. The system shall allow the journals to define required metadata fields, both during initial setup of the product and during the normal use of the product, without intervention from the provider’s technical support staff. Any data entered into these fields shall be reportable and available to export to other systems via routine processes executed by EHP Publishing.
2. The system shall offer a role-based permissions system for users, so new users can be assigned permissions to perform their job function quickly and easily.

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