Aries Systems Announces New Product, Task Manager, to Facilitate Editorial Tasks

Aries Systems Corporation, a leading technology supplier to the scholarly publishing community, announces the launch of Task Manager–the latest product to join an existing suite of workflow tools and solutions: Editorial Manager®, ProduXion Manager®, and Commerce Manager.

As part of continued industry innovation, Aries Systems has developed Task Manager to work seamlessly with Editorial Manager®, a leading online manuscript submission and peer-review system, to enable editorial task workflows. An easy, straightforward way to add tasks to editorial workflows, Task Manager facilitates assignment and tracking of important editorial activities prior to production and at any time in the workflow. Such items vary widely by publication, but some examples may include: language edits, artwork quality check, copyright check, conflict of interest form deposit, preprint server deposit, and much more. Task Manager will clarify assignment workflows, preventing confusion between editorial and production staff and ultimately decreasing time to publication by allowing more tasks to be completed upstream, rather than waiting until production is initiated.

Aries Director of Product Management Tony Alves explained, “We understand that editorial offices have numerous processes, like language edits, conflict of interest checks, or preprint exports that need to be performed on manuscripts–sometimes ad hoc, sometimes on a regular basis. Task Manager is designed to complement the peer review process by allowing tasks to be assigned in parallel to the more structured peer review workflow. It’s a simple but powerful tool that can be deployed at any point in the manuscript lifecycle, and can be used to import and export data and files, automate tasks, and even assign deadlines and send reminders.”

The development of Task Manager is a result of the more than $6 million Aries invests in new technology each year. Aries’ workflow solutions are used by thousands of scholarly publications to process millions of manuscripts worldwide.