Full-Service Journal Production for Netherlands Publishers: From Copyediting to Accessible XML Output

 

Most journal production workflows weren’t designed as one workflow. They were built piece by piece, a copyediting vendor here, a typesetting partner there, XML conversion handled separately, and accessibility bolted on at the end because a deadline made it urgent.

For Netherlands-based STM and academic publishers, sitting at the center of Europe’s open access transition with Elsevier’s global headquarters in the country, that fragmented approach is becoming a liability rather than just an inefficiency.

Here’s the problem with handling each stage separately: every handoff between vendors is a place where things get lost. A copyeditor flags a formatting issue that the typesetter doesn’t see. The XML conversion team tags content correctly, but nobody updates the accessibility metadata afterward. Each piece works, but the seams between them are where journals lose time, and where compliance gaps quietly form.

We built our journal production process specifically to remove those seams. A single workflow covering copyediting, typesetting, XML conversion, and accessibility output means the team handling XML tagging already knows what the copyeditor changed, and the accessibility metadata gets built in at the same stage as the XML, not as a separate project six months later.

For Dutch publishers specifically, this matters for two reasons happening at once. Open access mandates (Plan S and related funder requirements) increasingly expect XML-first output, not PDF-derived XML. And the European Accessibility Act, already in force, means every digital output needs to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant from the start, not remediated afterward.

Handling these as one workflow instead of four separate ones isn’t just faster, it’s the difference between accessibility being designed in and accessibility being an emergency retrofit project eighteen months from now.

If your current journal production process involves more handoffs than you’d like, or if accessibility has been treated as “phase two” of a project that hasn’t started yet, we’d be glad to walk through what a single-workflow setup would look like for your titles. Reach out to Wordium’s production team to start that conversation.

Wordium provides full-service journal production, copyediting, typesetting, XML conversion, and accessibility, as a single integrated workflow for STM and academic publishers.