CASE STUDIES
Emerald Publishing: Custom-Built Content Validation Engine
Swapnil Midha
Head of Communications
This case study examines how Emerald Publishers used TNQTech’s Content Validation Engine to ensure consistency, accuracy, and completeness of content before publishing.
"Using TNQTech's Content Validation Engine has transformed how we verify content we receive at various stages of our production value chain before online publication. It has set in place a standardised framework across our multiple content partners, and nearly entirely eliminated errors, failures, and missing elements. It has helped our teams significantly increase efficiency and eradicate redundant work, and the improved speed to publication supports a positive publishing experience for our authors. TNQTech has been an invaluable partner in helping us achieve this."
What is Content Validation?
Content “packages” processed at various stages during the production workflow, both internally and via partners, need to be checked for accuracy and sanctity of multiple journal-specific elements, including XML, metadata, images, PDF, and multimedia files, before being deemed of acceptable quality. This is crucial for efficient and fast publishing across digital platforms.
Emerald’s Challenge
Before TNQTech’s Content Validation Engine was implemented, Emerald would manually assess processed content packages received from multiple partners, before sending them through for online publishing. Given that there are a significant number of things to check, it was prone to human error. Their internal systems would then throw errors and reject content, leading Emerald to spend a sizeable amount of time:
- Interpreting and identifying errors
- Seeking resupplies from partners
- Going back and forth with several teams
Collaborative Solution
TNQTech’s product teams have developed and delivered configurable solutions to tackle these challenges for other customers to great positive impact, and suggested a customised version for Emerald’s specific needs.
We then worked closely with Emerald to ideate, iterate, and implement a custom validation engine that would check the integrity of every artefact against guidelines, establish a more efficient workflow, endeavour to eliminate errors and back-and-forth, and speed up time to publication.
The tool produces a validation report that presents a “success” or “failure” message, with the latter offering details and specifics. Errors and problems are curbed at this stage, therefore nearly entirely eliminating rejections from the online platforms. Since January 2023 and across 350,000 pages, Emerald has been able to collaborate with all its partners to improve the overall quality of the delivered content packages, and seek resupplies and corrections quicker.
"We see the reduced error rate while depositing metadata with Crossref as a big win, our service desk has seen far fewer incident tickets being raised, and from a customer point of view, things just work! Ensuring XML accuracy and consistency has also streamlined interactions with author-facing systems such as Proof Central."
A Bird’s Eye View of the Workflow
Results
- Bringing “failures” down to nearly zero across all content
- Pinpointing errors and eliminating the need to search through multiple files
- Improving metadata deposit rates for Crossref by 90%
- Establishing feedback loops to constantly improve and add to the tool
- Quicker time to publication by diagnosing and addressing errors much earlier in the workflow and eliminating rework loops
- Saving precious time by removing re-working and multiple manual checks
- Setting clear requirements helping partners to develop and adapt their internal systems
- Enhancing author satisfaction by ensuring accurate XML and content display
- Reduction in support tickets by ensuring completeness of content before publishing
