ProofCheck by River Valley

After evaluating several competing products in 2016, De Gruyter has chosen River Valley’s online proofing platform, ProofCheck.

De Gruyter had previously been sending authors their proofs in PDF format for annotation.  Authors’ corrections would then be implemented to produce the final publication. De Gruyter was looking for a faster and more reliable system in order to minimise admin within the publication workflows of their online-only journals.

ProofCheck is the result of the application of River Valley’s thorough knowledge of the publishing market and production requirements for almost 30 years, coupled with 10 years of experience in development of online publishing platforms. ProofCheck makes the process of proof correction easier and faster for the author, the publisher, and the production vendor.

Authors can make corrections to proofs as well as answer any editor queries using a browser, and without the need to download any files. They use an HTML interface, but are in fact editing the XML in real time. Production editors can then simply accepts or reject changes, and the corrected XML is automatically sent back to De Gruyter’s vendor to produce the final publication.

Collaborating closely with De Gruyter’s specialist staff, River Valley’s developers ensured that every type of content was catered for, including complex math, graphics and tables. ProofCheck tracks all changes using an innovative content tracker, so De Gruyter staff can see who made a change and when.

Franziska Buehring, senior manager for production standards and solutions at De Gruyter, said: 'ProofCheck improves the authors’ experience at the critical stage of correction. Because the content is saved as XML at all times, the accuracy of the archived XML was also increased. We are confident that this solution allows us to better serve the needs of our authors.'

River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan added: 'It has been a pleasure to work with the knowledgeable staff of De Gruyter who have been just as particular about the quality of the content and the user interface as River Valley’s developers and UX designers. We look forward to a long relationship with De Gruyter.'