Guidelines for Publishing Partners
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Below you will find recommendations for SPO's publishing partners on how best to provide us with your content for publication. By following these directions, you will help us keep errors to a minimum and allow us to continue offering low-cost publishing services with a fast turnaround time. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please do not hesitate to ask your contact person at SPO.
Instructions will vary based on the format of your electronic publication. However, there are a few things all publications have in common:
- Filenames: Your contact at SPO can provide you with information on how to name your files for sending to us.
- Timelines: Please keep us informed of when you plan to get your documents to us. The more predictable your schedule is and the more advance notice we have, the better we'll be able to schedule the work on our end.
- Batches: Because of our conversion workflow, we prefer to convert an entire issue (or full set of documents) all at once rather than article by article.
Guidelines for publications with page images
The guidelines in this section only apply to publications that display page images. Sending us your documents
Documents can be sent by mail on CD, DVD, hard drive, by file transfer protocol (FTP or SFTP), or by a file-transfer service. Your contact person at SPO can provide you with additional information on all of these options. Revisions and final changes
SPO will let you preview the new documents before the website is released to users, so you will have an extra chance to proof for errors at that time. File formats
In order of preference, we can accept:
- PDF files generated from electronic source documents.
- Bitonal TIFF files of scanned page images with a resolution of at least 600ppi.
- Bitonal TIFF files of scanned page images with a resolution of at least 150ppi.
- PDF files composed of scanned page images.
- Other scanned page images with a resolution of at least 150ppi.
- Paper copies which can be unbound during scanning and recycled after scanning.
- Paper copies which must be returned to you.
Guidelines for publications with electronic text
The guidelines in this section are for publications that display electronic text.
Sending us your documents
Documents can be sent as email attachments, by mail on CD, DVD, or hard drive, by file transfer protocol (FTP or SFTP), or by a file-transfer service. Your contact person at SPO can provide you with additional information on all of these options.
Revisions and final changes
Please send only final versions of files.
If you discover a change that must be made after you have sent files to us, please contact us promptly. We will advise you at that time on whether to send us replacement files (if we have not yet had a chance to begin ingesting the content), a paper copy with changes noted, a Word document with corrections marked using the "track changes" feature, or a list of changes.
SPO will let you preview the new documents before the website is released to users, so you will have an extra chance to proof for errors at that time.
File formats
We can accept files in many formats and will recommend a format for you depending on the specifics of your publication. Here's some general advice:
- Never use a line break (often created by typing Ctrl + Enter) when you mean to use a paragraph break (Enter). Our conversion ignores all line breaks since they are typically used to override word spacing for a particular print layout.
- For bulleted or numbered lists, use the list feature in your program for all items in the list rather than typing numbers (or inserting bullets) by hand to fix numbering.
- If you insert foreign characters or words, use a Unicode font rather than a pre-Unicode font like Symbol.
Microsoft Word documents
- Do not use Word's "bookmark" feature.
- Turn off automatic hyphenation and delete all optional hyphens used to break words across lines.
- If your text includes hyperlinks, these should be real Word hyperlinks. (If you hover over them in Word, the URL pops up.) Alternatively, if you are satisfied with having the URL displayed inline but also want this URL to be clickable when published online, the URL needs to be surrounded by angle brackets or square brackets without any other special formatting.
- Use Word's footnote feature to create footnotes or endnotes rather than putting these in the body of the document.
Page layout programs: Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, QuarkXPress, etc.
- Page layout programs use "story boxes" to structure chunks of text. These boxes can be linked together so that text flows from one box to another. Be sure to use only one box for an entire journal article or other unitary text. If there is a diagram or figure in the middle of the text, the text should flow around this object.
- Create hyperlinks as in Microsoft Word (see above), except keep in mind that only embedded hyperlinks in Microsoft Publisher will convert correctly. Hyperlinks in other programs should display the URL inline, as is an option for Word (see above).
Images and multimedia content
Instead of embedding multimedia content (i.e., image, audio, or video files) in the document, send these as separate files. Indicate in the word-processor or page-layout document where each image, audio file, etc. should go with explanatory text such as "Image #1 goes here."
If your publication displays images in only one or two sizes, without any zooming features, your image should be no taller than 650 pixels so that it will fit on the screen in common screen resolutions. If you have access to image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop, use optimization features like "save for web" that optimizes for on-screen viewing. Please send files in JPEG (.jpg) or GIF (.gif) format.
If your publication displays images in a pop-up window with zooming features, you can send images in any size and in any format.
PDF files
When creating PDF files, always choose to embed fonts. This will ensure that the files look the same when viewed on other computers.
Accessory information: abstracts, author bios, issue titles, etc.
Each digital object that we publish has associated metadata that helps users find it. While every item has a title and author (or editor), only some of them have information like keywords, abstracts, volume and issue, and page numbers.
In a print document, metadata typically appears at the beginning or end of a text, or in running headers or footers. You should feel free to continue these conventions in source documents given to SPO, especially since our metadata cannot represent italics, bold, superscript, subscripts, or other font effects.
Since running headers and footers are not preserved in conversion from Word or page layout programs, any information recorded here should also appear at the beginning of the body as well to ensure that it displays properly.
Any metadata not appearing in the body of the document should be sent to SPO.
If you send SPO a separate document for each article, be sure to specify the order in which they should appear in the virtual table of contents for the issue.
