I'm looking for a solution to a problem that certainly must have been faced many times before. I am an editor of a mathematics research journal with a dozen or so other area-specific sub-editors scattered all over the planet. I'm looking for a Web-based system to manage manuscripts. All of our submissions are in LaTeX and various people have different tasks in the process from submission -> refereeing -> editing -> final preparation. I'd like software that lets people download files to work on, upload them back to the site and also keeps a "paper trail" of who did what when along with archives of older versions. This sounds similar to the revision control systems used by many software development teams, but I'd like a Web interface and a system not aimed so much at source code. Before I jump into creating my own on a LAMP server, I'd like to know if appropriate software already exists. I'd hate to reinvent the wheel only to find out it's already been done much better.

This sounds like a project I wanted to try out. Never got around to it, but here's an alternative that may work for you: http://latexki.nomeata.de/

Hi Lee, I recently hosted a development project on one of my servers for a journal for which I am one of the editors, Paleontologia Electronica (http://palaeo-electronica.org/). A fellow editor developed a PHP/MySQL solution called Pemsats, some details here http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/pe/2007_3/editorial/focus.htm Alternatively, I use elog for my personal collaborations, manuscript tracking, etc. I think that it works quite well, but suitability might depend on the scale of your operation. Elog can be found here https://midas.psi.ch/elog/ My own elog page is here, though most of the pages are locked http://zeus.calacademy.org:8080/

I found an almost-ideal solution in ikiwiki and the tex4ht plugin. As the latter's author notes, the plug-in is quite noisy, but other than that this is a really neat solution for offering on-line latex editing and distribution, revision control (through a real VCS) and tight latex integration and customisability.

"an almost-ideal solution in ikiwiki" : I believe ikiwiki has recently been made to work with the revision-control system monotone. Monotone has features allowing one to attach certificates to specific revisions, which might help with tracking refereeing and editing and such.

Dear Lee, The Open Journal System http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs is offering a quite well integrated system for managing the whole process from review to publication. The software is developed by a partnership involving several Canadian Universities and is used by over 1400 journals, so the tool is developed by academics for academics. Browsing through their message board, I found a message from researchers from the top French research institution INRIA indicating they tweaked a bit the tool so they could use a 100% LateX process (see http://www.dmtcs.org/index-v1.html for their site and http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/1001 for the message posted, I am sure they would love to help you with your project). Just let us know which tool you decided to use. Cheers