Amye Kenall is the Publishing Project Coordinator and a Publishing Editor at Pion, who publish Society and Space. She oversees the entire production process for Society and Space from receipt of the final manuscript to online and print publication of papers. In addition, she is coordinating the transition of all the journals at Pion to a new electronic submission system for authors and editors and to a new more efficient production workflow.
SE: Thanks for talking to us, Amye. Perhaps we could start with your background. You’ve been working for Pion for a couple of years. What did you do beforehand?
AK: Previously, I lived in Washington, DC, and did book publishing for the World Bank and various development agencies. Like Society and Space, the books I worked on in this environment had a strong international feel to them. However, the creative opportunities in terms of graphics and layout are often missing in journal publishing, which is why I welcome such works as our forthcoming commentary by Ronald Rael in issue 3 this year in response to Edward S. Casey’s paper “Border vs Boundary at La Frontera”.
SE: When we as editors accept a piece for the journal, we send it to you. Usually, unless there are problems, that’s the last editors see of it until it is in the journal. What happens next?
AK: Well, it’s a bit of a process. Once you send me a paper I correspond with the author to ensure we have all their final publication materials, such as any figure or image files that might be missing. The paper is then sent to a layout artist, who lays out the paper according to the journal layout. After being laid out, the paper is lightly copy edited. Such copy edits usually involve editing for grammar, journal style, and accuracy. Papers from authors who have taken into account the author notes pass through the production process much more quickly. After being edited, the paper is sent to a typesetter, who inserts the edits and figures or images, producing something very close to the final product. The paper is sent to a proofreader, back to myself (who reviews these changes), to the typesetter, and then finally to the author for approval.
SE: Society and Space comes out every two months. Does this mean you are working on several issues simultaneously, or are you able to do them in sequence?
AK: Although we do prioritize papers sequentially by issue, papers for special issues, review essays, commentaries, editorials, and other special pieces often come in quite near their publication date, and so production is not necessarily married to the date a paper was received by us.
SE: Any things that authors do that make your task harder; anything they could do to make it easier?
AK: Absolutely. Papers by authors who adhere to the journal style, especially regarding in-text citations, references, and footnotes, can be published much more quickly and with fewer errors. It may seem trivial—I’m not saying it isn’t—but publishers want their journals to maintain a consistent style across all their papers. If these changes are made by the author before the paper hits production, the chance for error drops dramatically, and the paper can be published as an advance online publication much more quickly.
Those authors less familiar with publishing also tend to see the proofs we send them of their paper as a chance to rewrite whole paragraphs or long footnotes. Proofs are not for rewriting. The paper the author submits to you as his or her revisions, which you then send to me, should be the final version of the paper. This will become more explicit when Society and Space transitions to using an electronic submission system, which hopefully it will be doing shortly.
SE: How has electronic publishing changed the work of a production editor?
AK: Electronic publishing has changed and is continuing to change nearly every aspect of the publishing business. In terms of online publishing, papers can now be quickly published online before appearing in print—which we’re happy to do if an author needs his or her paper published as soon as possible. It also means authors can include supplemental material the print journal doesn’t have the page count for or just isn’t the medium for, like video, for instance. And because publishing software is becoming smarter and smarter, authors’ papers can now be embedded with lots of exciting functionality and be easily exported into XML and HTML. This is already starting to happen for our open-access journal i-Perception , and we hope to transition all the Environment and Planning journals over to this new production workflow within the year.
SE: Thanks for this information and for talking to me. Good luck with the work and we will perhaps ask you to say more about this nearer the changes coming into effect.
