January 22, 2020

Edifix and the University Press

If there’s one thing university presses know well, it’s the challenges of long reference lists and bibliographies. Will the author follow your painstakingly compiled guidelines, or will they just use the style they like best (or some bewildering mixture of styles)? If an author uses reference management software, will they remember to proofread the results before submitting their manuscript, or will you get dozens of non-standard sources shoehorned into a template meant for journal articles? You know from experience that almost every bibliography contains inaccuracies, transcription errors, and duplications; will you have the time and resources to catch them all? 

Navigating the Interconnected Ecosystem

Books need to work on ereaders and online as well as in print, and that means linking! And for the majority of university presses that are Crossref members, publishing DOIs of cited works is just as much a membership obligation as depositing DOIs for their own publications.

In social science, health science, and related disciplines, making books and journals as useful as possible might also mean including not only DOI links but as many PubMed ID (PMID) links as possible.

There are several ways to retrieve those links and get them into your bibliographies:

1. You can leave the work to your authors. At least in theory, this option has the lowest financial and time costs; however, it’s also likely to produce the least reliable results, which can lead to unanticipated time and/or monetary costs when, in practice, your staff have to coach, monitor, and/or tidy up after an author who didn’t do the job right.
2. You can pay your in-house staff or freelance copy editors to look up and insert links by hand. The advantages of this option over relying on authors are clear: more control over the process, more reliable results, and the potential for efficiencies and economies of scale. It’s also clear that this option incurs higher direct costs to you, and takes up valuable time from skilled editors. 
3. You can use software to find and insert DOI links and PMID links before human review. While this option incurs additional costs, using software can save your staff and freelancers an enormous amount of time, and therefore will ultimately save you money. In addition to linking, software can fill in missing reference information, flag discrepancies, and correct authors’ transcription errors! It can also flag citations to content that has been corrected or retracted.

But What about My Budget?

Your university press may have considered a high-end solution like our eXtyles software and concluded that it doesn’t fit your budget. Nevertheless, you still have the same reference-editing challenges as a publisher with a larger budget or a higher volume of output, the same obligations as any other Crossref member, and the same pressure to reduce time to publication. 

This kind of challenge is exactly what Edifix was designed to address! A cloud-based reference editor using the same reference processing technology as our eXtyles solutions, Edifix is available via monthly or annual subscription at a wide range of volume tiers, from 250 to 2500 references/month (5000 to 50,000 references/year; we also offer Enterprise Plans for even higher volumes). 

Edifix also lets you choose any of 20+ reference styles (including MLA, APA, and both Chicago systems) and export to any of half a dozen formats (including Word, XML, and RIS, the latter of which can be imported into reference managers like EndNote). Edifix runs in the cloud, so you can automatically edit your references while you’re focusing on something else (such as wrestling with an author’s vocabulary choices)!

Reference entry Edifixed in Chicago Bibliography style:

Reference entry Edifixed in Chicago Author-Date style:

Our goal with Edifix was to design a tool that adds DOI and PMID links to bibliographies and reference lists, improves reference accuracy, saves time for editors, and is cost-effective for a wide variety of users—including those, like many university presses, that operate with tight timelines and a limited budget. 

We also recently launched Edifix for Teams, which is designed to make managing your Edifix account easier. Edifix for Teams lets you give a whole group of in-house and/or freelance editors individual access to Edifix, monitor their work, and assign their roles as needed.

Almost anyone in the scholarly publishing space—from freelance editors to university presses to publishing suppliers—can benefit from Edifix!  

But Will It Actually Work for Us?

We’re confident it will! But don’t take our word for it: you can sign up for a free 30-day trial and Edifix up to 100 bibliography entries to test it out.

Follow this link to give Edifix a try!