Publishing organizations, such as Literary and Art magazines, receive a wide selection of content for each edition. These publications require some method of sorting through the contributions for each edition. This involves staff members reading through each contribution and deliberating to determine which content makes it into their final product. This can be a complicated process that could be aided by having the available submissions available online to be viewed and rated by each staff member.
SubmitFlow is a comprehensive workflow tools for publications that use collaborative review processes. The application was first developed because existing submission management products focused primarily on the highly formal committee processes used by scientific journals. A key guiding principle for SubmitFlow was for the application to still be useful even when all the committee members were sitting in the same room.
Features include:
- Submission form: Publications can bounce external contributors directly to the application to submit their works. The intake process focuses on user-friendliness, but also enforces a standardized format for certain types of submissions--for example, literature submissions should distinguish between paragraph and line breaks.
- Submission management: Staff can view, discuss, and vote on submitted articles, works, and content
- Workflow customization: Administrators assemble their workflow around an arbitrary number of "stages". Each stage specifies the conditions through which submissions advance to the next stage (for example, passing a vote).
- Real-time collaboration: Comments and votes are reflected to all staff in real-time. The application can be used as part of an in-person workflow, where one member leads a review session and others follow along on their personal devices.