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Initial Manuscript Check

1. Overview and Context

After a contractmanuscript has been signed,returned by the manuscriptauthor isafter submitted toincorporating external (peer)review review.comments, it should be checked against our style guide and guidelines.

2. Triggers

The execution of this procedure is usually triggered by

3. Steps to Be Performed

Upon receipt of the signed contract from the author, the ms. is forwarded to two members of the Editorial Advisory Board for peer review, who are asked to provide additional and constructive comments on the mss. within 1–2 months. External peer review may be solicited dependent on the wishes/needs of the author.

Submissions through imprints have generally already been peer reviewed by the imprint's editorial board. The punctum co-directors exercise their editorial discretion in skipping external peer review for manuscripts such as memoirs or poetry collections.

In the Trello Submissions board, the index card is moved to Editorial Board Review column.

Once peer review reports have been received, these are forwarded to the author together with the submission guidelines for monographs and edited collections respectively. The index card is moved to the TrelloIncoming ProductionManuscript PipelineScan board,column.

There is a first broad check whether the ms. complies with the requirements as set out in the Style Guide, in particular:

    All documents should be properly numbered Spelling should be uniformly US (or, less preferrably, UK) (§1). Take care with Canadian/Australian authors who often have weird mixes. Citation style must be broadly compliant with our standards, and not in a non CMoS style (§13). Check that this is true for notes and bibliography.
      For edited collections, make sure this is true for each chapter. Make sure authors have consistently added DOI numbers to the bibliography (§13.8). Make sure all books include a "Front Matter" file that includes a Table of Contents. Make sure images, tables, etc. are not included in the word files. Make sure there are no track changes or comments. Make sure all the necessary metadata are included, in particular those mentioned in §1.6 of the Guidelines. Make sure all images includes have the right resolution of 300dpi. This often goes wrong. Rule of thumb: any image below 1MB in size is a red flag, consult with Vincent if this appears. Makes sure images have captions and alt text and they are collated into separate documents. No grey highlighting on footnotes/references, which includes embedded links to bibliographic management software. Make sure that the synopsis follows our guidelines and is actually a good synopsis.

      For edited collections:

        Make sure editor biographies, abstracts, and chapters all match up.

        Set up the editorial stylesheet with any particulars about book size, images, design, etc. and place in the book folder.

        The index card is moved to the Waiting for FinishedRevised MsMS column. column.Once it has been revised, it goes to Pre-production

        4. Additional Information

        5. Document Control

        Document ID PRO-031
        Document Owner Vincent
        Version 1.0
        Last Date of Change November 10, 2025
        Next Review Due Date
        Version & Change Tracking
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