Electronic Processing of Submissions

Dot Colors

At JACoW conferences, papers that are processed by editors are assigned colored "dots" to indicate their processing status.

A green dot is assigned when a paper is processed and passed all editorial criteria for publishing. An author with a green dot need take no further action, and can be confident that the paper will be in the proceedings.

A yellow dot means that the editor made some small changes to the paper and is seeking your approval of those changes. Those changes should not change the scientific content, but may change the formatting of the paper, including location of figures, location and size of figure/table captions, font sizes, etc.

If you receive a yellow dot, you should login to the SPMS instance for the conference, read the comments from the editor, check the PDF copy of your paper, and approve or reject the author's changes. If you approve the changes, you immediately get a green dot.

A red dot means that the paper has fundamental flaws that prevent the editor from fully processing the paper. These may be missing figure or reference references in the text, misapplication or alteration of the JACoW templates, or a paper that runs over the page limit determined by the conference.

If you receive a red dot, you should login to the SPMS instance for the conference, read the comments from the editor, modify the source of your file and generate a new PDF, and resubmit the paper after addressing the editor's concerns. The editor is automatically notified of red dot papers that have new files uploaded. The paper dot color will stay red until the author reprocesses the paper and gives it another dot color.

Help Preparing Submissions

JACoW Reference Search & Generation Tool

Authors preparing submissions must used the most recent Word/LaTeX/OpenDocument templates provided at JACoW.org. JACoW now provides two useful tools to help authors to produce well prepared submissions. All Authors are strongly encouraged to use the below tools when preparing your submissions, and prior to submitting. The JACoW Reference Search and Generation Tool has a complete database of all published, presented but proceedings unpublished, and scheduled papers for “this conference”. The tool allows multiple ways to find a reference which you can also navigate to the pdf, and generates a preformatted reference for Word, LaTeX, and BibTeX.

CatScan Editor Tool

The CatScan Editor can be used by authors to scan/check a DOCX or LaTeX document while writing, and prior to submission to give you instant feedback on your document. This tool in particular for Word has a rich suite of tests that it applies to the scanned document to give you guidance for corrections. To use select either the Word of LaTeX screen, select the file, followed by selecting the conference (‘’Note: the file name must match the papercode assigned once it has been scheduled’’), and then click scan which will also check your title and listed authors in additional to the regular checks to ensure your document title and authors match who you have listed in the conference scientific management tool SPMS. The tool also has a “No Specific Conference” which will scan any paper, ignoring the file name, and wont check the title or author list.

Adobe PDF Format

Adobe PDF is an industry standard that has been adopted by JACoW for the publication of conference papers. JACoW is an open archive, and the files published on it are tailored to meet specific standards that will ensure the long-term future of the archive. It is important that the PDF files conform to certain standards, which is why conferences issue specific instructions on how to produce the files that are to be converted for publication at JACoW.

Most JACoW conferences now accept author-generated PDF files (no Postscript). Those files are reprocessed by the conference proceedings office for compression, font embedding, PDF/A conformity, etc. Each final PDF file contains hidden fields defining a set of information containing a title, the author name, subject, and keywords. At the same time, page numbering, conference title, and other information such as copyright details are added to each page.

The PDF files are published on the JACoW site with HTML indices and other conference information. The JACoW custom search engine interface allows boolean searches on keywords, title, authors, and in the full text.

Performance

The JACoW collaboration considers the performance of the website to be very important for users, considering the wide range of users around the world and the range of resources available to them. JACoW papers should display quickly, and a key factor in the speed with which a page is displayed is the size and complexity of the file. Typically, each page should display in 5/N seconds, where N is the processor speed in GHz. Graphics and illustrations can be painfully slow if the files are too big or complex. See the section on Graphics for dealing with large, detailed images.

Why is paper size an issue?

Because different paper sizes are used throughout the accelerator community, A4 and US letter, JAcoW papers are processed to take that difference into account. Otherwise, papers printed out on a paper size different from the original could result in some information being lost.

To solve this problem, part of the paper processing process is to crop the submitted PDF file to the minimum dimensions of A4 and US Letter paper (i.e., A4 width and US letter height, or 210 by 279 mm). This specification allows for centering of the text no matter which paper size was used originally, while still allowing sufficient margins for page numbers, conference banners, copyright information, and other labels to be added. For JACoW editors to process papers this way, it's necessary for authors to select a specific paper size and to create and save their PDF file using that same paper size--hence the need for two templates for each type of software used.

Preferred Software for Paper Preparation

Word, LaTeX, and OpenDocument (LibreOffice/OpenOffice) are preferred by the editorial teams.

It is acceptable for authors to use other software to prepare their papers, but they will then have to be careful to follow the layout instructions and conventions and be sure that their PDF files will be acceptable. Use of non-preferred software also makes it very difficult for the editorial team to help fix problems.