Publication procedure
To publish contents on NDAPortal.com, every author should follow a publication procedure.
After a registered user has been granted an author role (see how to apply for an author role), he/she can start to build his/her own content. The new content will follow a publishing workflow, starting from the "draft" state up to "published". There are 4 possible states of the content are:
- DRAFT: when the content is in this state, it is NOT published, nor made available for comments except to the author. Only the author can access it to allow for incremental editing, personal review and modification. When the author has finished writing the content and thinks that it should be ready for submission, then it can switch to the state "REVIEW".
- REVIEW: in this state the content is requested to be under review. All the contents must pass the review, which will check that there is no spam, no offensive or otherwise forbidden content. The review process will not deal with the specific topics of the content, but simply check and correct the form used to present it. This review process is done by an administrator that, when finished, will switch the content to two possible states: "PUBLISHED" or "REWORK".
- PUBLISHED: At the end of the review state, if the administrator considers the content ready for publishing, then the content is switched to the "PUBLISHED" state. Then, the content will be visible on the front page and in the categories to which it belongs (Handbook, articles, etc.)
- REWORK: In the case that, at the end of the review process, the administrator thinks that the content needs some rework from the author side (for example due to some figure or graph) the content is switched to this state and action is required from the author. When the author has finished the corrections, then the content can be switched to the review state to ask for a second check before publishing.
In order to publish you can choose between two content creation methods. To get a detailed description of these methods, click on the following links.
Off-line creation and editing of the content
The off-line creation and editing procedure for the content is very simple and consists of 5 steps:
- Download the MS Word doc template or the RTF template
- Write your content using that template. Please, follow the writing guidelines included in the template.
- Create an empty article online with a title, an abstract and a body. The title, the abstract and the author list must reflect what is written in the doc file used to write the article. The body should contain only one sentence: "Refer to attachment". At the bottom of the form used to create the content, you'll find a field where you can attach the MS Word or RTF doc file of your content. When you submit it, the content will be put in the draft state and the word doc file will be uploaded.
- Switch to review state: after the content is put in draft state, you can access your workflow (my account => workflow) and promote your content to review state. The administrator (or the reviewer) will take care of formatting the article in order to be published online. After this process is completed, the content will be put in the rework status and you will be requested to check it and verify that it corresponds to what you've written.
- Accept the contents for publication: after this you can re-submit the contents by promoting it to the review status again (my account=>workflow page). The administrator will then take care of promoting it to the published status.
After completing step 5, the article will be published and put online. You can expect that it will stay some days in the front page and in the RSS feeds, and that some users can post comments to your contribution. Check your article from time to time to read and answer the comments that can be posted by the other registered users.
If you have any comments or doubts about how to submit online, please don't hesitate to send and e-mail with your question to admin@ndaportal.com .
On-line creation and editing of the content
All the contents that are available on NDAPortal.com, can be edited directly online. Thanks to the powerful rich text editor and to the MathML* syntax, it is possible to create and edit complex documents with mathematical formulas using most of the features of common desktop rich text editors. As for all rich text editors, some practice is needed to use all the capabilities available for editing. Here we'll discuss a short procedure to use the most common features to edit an online article.
Let's start with a short tutorial: How to create a standard article.
In order to create any type of content, you should click on the link "Create content", located on your navigation block on the right.
When you click on this link, a submenu is loaded, displaying a list of the type of contents that you are allowed to create.
In our case, you can select the "Article" link, but any other allowed type is possible, depending on the author role that you have.
When you click on this link, a new page opens, where you can write and save your content for later editing.
As you may notice, there are fields with a red asterisk. These fields are required, and no content can be saved without these fields being filled. For an article you will need to put (even if temporary) content in these fields:
- Title
- Keywords
- Abstract
- Body of the article
- Conclusions
All the other fields are optional, and you can fill them also at a later time.
At the end of the page, you'll notice that there is a link named "Optinal Content". If you click on this link, two new text areas open that allow you to enter also:
- Acknowledgements
- References
For each of these text areas, required or optional, you can use the available rich text editor in full screen mode. To do so, you have to click on the area that you want to edit and then on the icon:
In this way you can edit your document like a common rich text editor inside your browser window. When you've finished, you can click again on the full screen icon and save the content by submitting it.