How to manage article processing charges for publishers?

Publishing teams have to spend substantial effort in consolidating production activities and payments. Through its extensive experience, MPS has identified the following challenges in creating a workflow solution that manages both article processing activities and payments. The software will have to:

Consolidate information across multiple production systems
Manage the final production activities prior to publishing
Track project status and tasks
Process payments and associate them with corresponding projects

Payment systems are complicated and have various modalities. In journals, the costs have to be segregated by fixed and variable. In addition, the solution must have provision for making and tracking partial payments.

Solution

Tackling these challenges will require a solution that combines a project management tool, payment gateway, and payment reconciliation engine. MPS proposes the following arrangement to create a fully functional article processing and payment workflow software.

Use MPS’ Manuscript Submission System to manage article submission and processing and utilize MPSTrak Production Workflow Management System for production activities. The MPS APC System can be set up to interact with both the applications for managing the APC.

In the proposed solution, we configure the fixed and variable cost (number of pages of manuscripts, table count, color, and black & white figure count) at MPS Submission System. Once the editorial activities, such as peer review, journal development, administrative support, and content commissioning, have been completed, the partial payment process gets initiated. MPS APC System initiates the payment process and updates the status according to the original systems and to the author who is making the payment.

The finalized manuscript then automatically gets ingested into our MPSTrak workflow management system, and the workflow gets initiated. We have configured task level payment capturing information, where task owners can enter the number of hours spent on xml processing, number of pages worked on copyediting, typesetting template cost, page proof charges (1st pass corrections, 2nd pass corrections), etc. A consolidated payment information will be displayed to the Journal Editor before approval and sharing with the author. Authors get notified through emails and make the balance payments that are associated with the production activities. Reconciliation process has been taken care of by the MPS APC System, where it marks the charges for a particular article as complete and generates the invoice. Both MPS Manuscript Submission System and MPSTrak displays the order status and an option to download the invoice.

The MPS APC System allows the publisher to access the administrator dashboard and see a glance of all activities that have been performed. An intuitive reporting section provides a wide range of reports in both graphical and tabular format with an option to export as Excel or PDF.

To know more, reach out to marketing@mpslimited.com or request for a demo using the buttons below.