Scientific, Technical and Medical Publications are known as STM in short.
Science, technology and medicine are the top subjects in publishing houses as most of the scientists are authors. They publish their works as books, journals or research papers. Thousands of English journals and books are published under these areas every year worldwide.
Professional practitioners and specialists are involved in the editing and author proofing of these Scientific, Technical and Medical Publications. In the process of author proofing for STM, no more the author or the publisher has to mark the edits or corrections and send it through mail.
Online proofing:
With technological developments, author proofing has taken a leap forward. The proofs aren’t been mailed or faxed anymore. The PDF, after being edited is instantly transferred through internet, where on the other end the author would be able to immediately access it online and add note or provide explanation. The author can use any operating system, browser such as Internet Explorer, Google chrome, Firefox, Opera or mobile device to view the document sent as a PDF and he can also take a print out of it if required.
Online proofing not only speeds up the author proofing process but also minimizes the errors that may occur during the time of correction.
Online proofing will provide the authors with the article’s interactive XML proof which will allow them to make the corrections directly in the tables, equations, formulae or texts of the STM publications and revert it back in a click.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a format which is both machine and human readable. It is the basic format for publishing any publication in electronic or print form. Along with the XML format, a PDF version is also generated for the author’s records.
The authors will be able to review the corrections and changes without skipping or missing any of them as all of those would be highlighted and separately listed with hyperlinks.
Checking STM proof:
In STM publications, the authors have to make sure that they clearly answer all the questions and doubts of the editor team to avoid factual or typographical errors. If any error is spotted in the proof, it will to be corrected but the text will not be rewritten as the editor would have followed a journal style.
The final proof has to be checked against the original manuscript for accuracy. The figures, tables and captions have to be checked and the names of the authors and co-authors have to be looked over.
