Authoring Process Overview
An author interested in contributing new content to any one of the encyclopedias in the network participates in an online "workflow," or a series of tasks involved in publishing peer reviewed hypertexts. The workflow for FEN authors includes the following tasks: (1) join the encyclopedia network; (2) request authoring privileges and access to pages to be edited; (3) create a new contribution consisting of a set of linked parent and child content pages; (4) copy offline content into online pagese; (5) attach figures, tables, and citations to the content pages; (6) submit your contribution to the appropriate FEN editor; (7) revise your contribution in response to the comments of peer reviewers and technical editors; and (8) resubmit your contribution to the appropriate FEN editor. Steps 1 and 2 represent an administrative phase that sets the stage for authoring to begin. Steps 3, 4, and 5 deal with the mechanics of authoring. Steps 6, 7, and 8 consist of the publishing process.
After you complete the series of tasks in the authoring portion of the workflow, FEN editors will execute the publishing portion of the workflow. The publishing process begins when an author submits a set of pages (including a parent page and supporting child pages) to the appropriate FEN editor. In most cases an FEN editor will already be in contact with the author to guide him/her through the publishing process. Otherwise, the author should identify the appropriate editor early in the authoring stage by determining the particular encyclopedia volume and the section within that volume where they would like to publish their pages and then locating the name and email address of the editor for that section. Section editors provide commentary to the author. The publishing stage of the workflow involves the following series of tasks: (1) section editors determine whether to dispatch an authors contribution to peer reviewers; (2) section editors forward authored content to external peer reviewers to assess the document and supporting content for its scientific merit; (3) peer reviewers provide commentary on the content and forward it to the section editors; (4) technical editor reviews the content for grammar, style, and form; (5) section editors assess peer reviewers commentary and determine whether to reject the content or ask an author to revise and resubmit the content; (6) the contribution is submitted to the editorial board for review and final acceptance; and (7) a section editor informs the author of their decision regarding the publication of your contribution. If at any point in the workflow a contribution is changed significantly or rejected, the entire publishing process must be repeated.
The various tasks contributors are allowed to perform within the encyclopedia system are predetermined by one or more roles each is assigned: author, peer reviewer, technical editor, section editor, or editor-in-chief. It should be clear that authoring is only one ofmany roles in the encyclopedia system. The encyclopedia system regulates access to content based on a contributors role. Roles are identified by usernames and passwords which are regulated and supervised by the encyclopedia editors. Authors, for example, may submit content, but cannot modify any content other than their own. Authors can also check on the status of their own pages in the publishing process whenever they choose, but their access to peer reviewers comments is limited in order to keep reviewers anonymous.
FEN uses a page archiving system to mark pages that have been modified and to track the evolution of a contribution. Once the revised content completes the peer review cycle, the original content is converted into an archived page for backup and long-term storage. When an author views any page that contains an archived version, they are notified by a hyperlink to the entire lineage of archived pages. To ensure that out-of-date versions of a contribution are not returned by the networks search engine, page archives are not cataloged in the encyclopedia. By browsing this collection of archives, an author can get a sense of the direction of research and changes in what is known about the topic in question.
