• Authors can now submit their LaTeX or MS-Word manuscript source files at the submission stage and check review progress from their Web accounts.
• Referees can submit their reports through the easy-to-use web interface and have access to their assignments.
• Editors can manage and monitor submissions, send reminders to referees and be kept up-to-date via automatic email alerts.

Beginning with the company's top-flight journals, such as International Journal of Modern Physics A and International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, the company plans to migrate the majority of its more than 100 journals to the new submissions platform over the next 12 months.

Editorial Manager, developed by the US firm Aries Systems, provides a full online solution for manuscript submission, peer-review, and tracking. The system puts powerful tools at the fingertips of contributors, referees and editors -- at anytime from an Internet-enabled computer.

With the improvement in review turnaround time, the company's journal staff also benefits. In addition, by encouraging a large shared database of referees, the system not only promises to take the chore out of journal administration but also allows editors to distribute work to the most expert and available referees, thereby pushing up scientific quality.

Prospective conference organizers who need to handle a large number of peer-review contributions to a proceedings volume can also be offered these cutting-edge online facilities. At the end of the process, all the electronic material is already available, ready to be downloaded and published.