First public release in preparation

From accepted manuscript to clean HTML galley – a publishing software project for small journals.

GalleyForge is being built to reduce manual production work at small scientific journals: a DOCX manuscript becomes structured data, an editor reviews it, and the journal gets a clean HTML article. It is in active development; parts exist as working prototypes, others are planned.

Explore the project View sample output

GalleyForge does not currently offer a conversion service. Please do not send manuscripts; this website has no order or upload function.

At a glance

  • Built for small society journals, university presses and independent journals
  • Human-controlled: an editor reviews every conversion
  • Structured data first, HTML as the first output format
  • Initiated by a practising journal publisher

The problem

Many small scientific journals still turn accepted manuscripts into web articles by hand: copying text from Word, placing figures and tables, formatting references and re-typing metadata. This is slow, error-prone and hard to keep consistent from issue to issue, and small teams rarely have the budget for enterprise publishing systems.

GalleyForge aims to make this step reproducible: the manuscript is converted into a structured representation once, checked, and then rendered consistently.

The planned DOCX-to-HTML workflow

1

Import

An accepted manuscript in DOCX format, with figures and tables, is imported.

2

Structure

Sections, authors, affiliations and references are detected and stored as structured data.

3

Review

An editor corrects the result; validation rules point out missing or inconsistent content.

4

Export

A clean, responsive HTML article is generated. Further output formats follow later.

Steps 1, 2 and parts of 3 exist as prototypes; the editor and the export of finished packages are planned. Details are on the project page.

Current status

Each item is assigned to one of three categories and was checked against the actual code and automated tests.

Already in the prototype

  • DOCX manuscript parsed into a structured data format and rendered as HTML (heuristic, limited testing)
  • Detection of sections, authors, affiliations and the corresponding author
  • Rule-based validation of the structured data with warnings and errors
  • Backend foundation: sign-in, journal-specific roles, journal settings, article records, file uploads, structured article content with safe saving, first validation rules

Planned for the first version

  • Browser-based review editor with autosave
  • DOCX import connected to the platform
  • HTML export including figures and tables
  • Journal-level configuration of required content

Later roadmap

  • PDF generation
  • Crossref and PubMed XML export
  • Complete publication package (ZIP)
  • Journal templates and validation profiles for several journals
  • AI-assisted structure analysis, always under editorial control

No release date has been set.

Feedback and pilot interest

I am interested in feedback from journal editors, production staff and publishers: What does your production workflow look like, and where does it cost the most time? If you would like to follow the project or take part in a later pilot, get in touch.

Contact:
hello@galleyforge.com

Please do not send unpublished manuscripts or personal data of authors or reviewers.

Send feedback

Who is behind GalleyForge? See About.