Q: I just arranged all of my articles into a new issue and clicked on the Publish Issue button but after several minutes of waiting the new issue is not appearing on my journal's web site (or the issue is only partially published).
A: The first thing to remember in this scenario is that sometimes publishing an entire journal issue can take 10 minutes or more, especially if the articles are rather long and/or contain a lot of graphics. The delay is caused by our optical character recognition (OCR) engine, which is carefully encoding each article to make sure everyone can find it with search engines like Google and Yahoo.
If you've waited more than 20 minutes or so for your journal issue to publish, then there's at least one thing you should check before contacting us to investigate: Do each of your issue's articles have the final, public facing version uploaded to the Galley Format PDF line of the Layout section on the Editing page? This is the single most common reason that a journal issue fails to publish, and it's an easy step to overlook. Here's a quick way to check:
- The first step is to find your way to the Table of Contents page for the issue that you tried to publish. Because you've attempted to publish this issue at least once, the issue has likely been moved to your journal's "Back Issues" queue. To get to the back issues queue, log in at https://submit.escholarship.org and make your way to your journal. Click on the Manage All Submissions link, then click on Back Issues near the bottom of the page that follows.
- From the list of back issues, click on the link for the issue that failed to publish.
- Now you need to check each article in the issue to make sure it has a Galley Format PDF loaded properly. Click on the title of the first article.
- Navigate to the Step 3. Editing page for this article
- In the Layout section, look for the Galley Format line, which is highlighted in yellow
- If a file is uploaded here, make sure that it is a PDF. If a PDF file is present, then this submission is fine but you'll need to check other articles in this issue. Skip to step 9 in this checklist.
- If there is another non-PDF format file here (such as a Word doc or RTF file; journals that publish in HTML should contact eScholarship support) you'll want to download the file for backup purposes by clicking on the file name, then use the Delete link in the action column to remove it from the yellow-highlighted Galley Format line.
- If there is no file here, you'll need to upload the final, public-facing version of the document in PDF format*. At the bottom of the Layout section select the Galley radio button next to the text that reads "Upload file to." Then click on the Browse button and select the appropriate file from your computer. Now click on the Upload button.
- Click on the Preview & Publish Issue link in the Scheduling section to return to this issue's Table of Contents page.
- You'll need to complete the same checks for each article in this issue, so click on the title of the next article in your Table of Contents.
- Repeat steps 4 through 10 in this checklist for the remaining articles.
- Once you've added a Galley Format PDF to every article in your issue, return to that issue's Table of Contents page and click on the Save Changes & Publish button. Your new issue should appear online within 10-20 minutes, often sooner.
If your issue still doesn't appear online after you've run through the check list above, contact eScholarship support directly for additional assistance. Be sure to indicate which troubleshooting steps you've already taken so that we can assist you more quickly.
*If you are unable to generate a PDF on your own, you may instead upload a Word doc, RTF or TXT file to the Layout Version line of the Layout section (just above the Galley Format line). Once your Doc, RTF or TXT file is uploaded to the Layout Version line, click on the Generate PDF button. A PDF will be automatically generated and added to the Galley Format line.
For additional help with issue arrangement and publishing, including a video walk-through of the above steps, check out the video "Issue Arrangement & Publishing" available in our help center.