The Challenge

Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX) is an academic journal for entrepreneurs. The people behind EIX are passionate about helping entrepreneurs succeed. They do this by publishing the latest academic research and commentaries much more quickly than is typical in traditional journals.

The typical submission process follows this sequence:

• Submission intake
• Sent to staff
• Staff validates and releases to reviewers
• Reviewers review and upload their list of changes
• Staff compiles reviews and either starts another edit/review round or prepares to publish
• Copy editor edits
• Finally published

Standard academic journals will take up to two years to review an article before publication, and the EIX team wanted to drastically decrease the review turnaround time.

The Strategy

Process improvement was needed to decrease time from intake to publish date. Since Code Pros had built the EIX website and managed it—and data improvements—successfully for over five years, they were a trusted resource and the first call for assistance. Code Pros and the team at EIX discussed the process, obstacles and typical delays with a goal of designing an integrated solution that would reduce the time needed to review and publish these noteworthy academic reports.

Code Pros excels at finding practical solutions to big ideas. We used our expertise, collaborative partnership and coding abilities to create a plan to achieve the aggressive goals at EIX.

The Solution

Code Pros worked with the EIX staff and professors of entrepreneurship from around the nation to create a submission review process that was tightly integrated into the website. The original course of activity was casual at best. People traded Word documents through email, and there was no way of knowing who was doing what, what the next steps were, or how or when it would all come together.

Code Pros built a single source of truth for the submission review process and integrated it into the website. Now, all data is tracked through the website, providing an easy and accurate method for the site staff to see where each submission is along the review process. With this monitoring segment in place, EIX can easily manage the sequence of events and provide prompts for its contributors, thereby accelerating the processing time.

The Outcome

Since implementing the Code Pros solution, the staff and reviewers can turn around a submission in as little as one month! With this remarkable improvement in publishing academic insights quickly, important information can now be shared—and implemented—without delay.

In addition to this solution, Code Pros provided EIX with other technological improvements including the website and its many revisions, an entire site-hosting provider migration, search capability for finding captions inside videos, and more. We added data to the site pages to improve visual appeal when being shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and we added data (Highwire Press) to allow citation software to cite articles easily. The site is integrated to Crossref to create Digital Object Identifiers for all premier content.

Thank you, EIX, for choosing Code Pros as your preferred web developer. We thrive on finding solutions like these and are excited to see you in the forefront with the ability to review and publish, quickly and expertly.