RSuite Enterprise Joins Content Management Strategy

Nature Publishing Group

Background

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high-impact scientific and medical information in print and online, including Nature and Scientific American. NPG publishes journals, online databases, and services across the life, physical, chemical, and applied sciences, and clinical medicine. NPG needed to replace several legacy production systems while leveraging the investment in existing tools including MarkLogic Server. Automation of manual workflows was a key business goal as this would facilitate scalable online journal production without an associated increase in resource requirements.

Solution

NPG adopted Contiem’s RSuite Enterprise® along with complementary technologies as part of its content strategy. NPG’s Internal Systems Development group (ISD) installed and configured the system to streamline the editorial and production workflow for its “Nature Reviews” series of journals. RSuite Enterprise’s workflow capabilities were configured to automate content production and enable the production of these journals with far fewer points of human interaction.

The system was first implemented on a test and development server while ISD worked with editorial and production staff to identify processes to be automated, such as DTD validation, uploading files, running build processes, creating Tables of Contents, notifying editorial staff of content in need of review, and publishing the reviewed files.

Results

Based on a series of business rules, RSuite Enterprise’s workflow engine classifies articles that are ready for publication. RSuite Enterprise pushes NPG’s journal content to its live web site on a rolling basis. Implementing RSuite Enterprise enables NPG to:

• Automate content production and apply automation wherever possible
• Add new journals into the publication schedule without adding new staff
• Reuse media assets across titles
• Consolidate multiple content-centric solutions
• Leverage the investment in MarkLogic Server