Aries Systems Corporation

Aries was thrilled to host the 23^rd annual Editorial Manager User Group (EMUG) meeting on June 10-12. Offered free of charge, the webinar-style sessions were designed to provide our global user community a flexible and accessible educational experience. Through our virtual platform, Aries connected with 380 unique registrants from 26 countries across all three days of the event – more than tripling our average reach for our legacy in-person meetings!

The EMUG 2025 agenda included engaging Q&As, covered workflow and reporting tips, introduced exciting new initiatives and integrations, and featured several guest speakers from key organizations within the industry to highlight a more diverse set of voices and perspectives. Check out the key highlights from EMUG 2025 below.

Following welcome statements from Aries’ Managing Director Jennifer Fleet, we kicked off the meeting by hosting the Ask the Experts: Configuration Consultation session! Four members of the global Aries Client Services (CS) team served on a panel to present underused features within Editorial Manager® (EM) and ProduXion Manager® (PM) and address live questions from the audience on all things workflows and configurations! This included submission file configurations, external Reviewer databases, canned summary and performance reports, flags, discussion forums, and so much more! In the next session, Maximizing End-to-End OA Metadata Management, we presented alongside the Executive Director of the Stichting OA Switchboard Yvonne Campfens. Together we detailed the importance of metadata within the scholarly publishing lifecycle, described the metadata solutions available within the industry and EM/PM, explored how to maximize the use of metadata early and often, and issued a call-to-action to leverage and standardize metadata to drive quality, transparency, and efficiency.

Aries remains committed to supporting research integrity and quality through strategic innovation and partnerships. Within the Collaborating for Research Integrity session on day two of EMUG, we began by recognizing the increasing integrity threats and challenges faced by both publishers and researchers and their wider impact on the scholarly publishing landscape. We then welcomed Dr. Shilpi Mehra, Head of Research Integrity at Cactus Communications, and Adam Day, Founder and CEO of Clear Skies, to spotlight their integrity solutions that have been recently integrated with EM – Paperpal Preflight for Editorial Desk and Papermill Alarm respectively. Next, we shifted to our Enterprise Analytics Reporting (EAR) session – a staple in the EMUG agenda and one of our most-popular amongst previous attendees – which included live demonstrations and reporting tips based on audience-led requests and questions.

On the third and final day of EMUG 2025, we were joined by a panel of clients and partners to present real-life use cases on existing and emerging technologies in the Solutions Showcase: Customer Success Stories session. First up we had Astrid Meyer, Journals Managing Editor of Penn State University Press, detailing how their use of the Find Reviewers using Scopus integration has made a positive difference in their accepted invitations and completed reviews rates. Then we heard from Sara Yow, Senior Editorial Operations Supervisory at Cell Press, as she detailed their unique experience leveraging the Task Manager feature in EM to streamline their task workflows, including reducing processing down to five minutes per paper for their Sneak Peek platform. The final panelist, AMA’s Director of Product Management Jon Perkins, introduced their EdHub CME Direct Credit Service – an exciting new Author recognition service medical researchers – which is currently being piloted and connected with EM. In keeping with tradition, the Road Ahead session was the final presentation of the meeting. Prior to closing remarks, our Product Management team provided an overview of the key themes on our development roadmap including the EM/PM Identity project, accessibility updates, multi-year initiatives to enhance to the Author and Reviewer workflows, and strategic growth in our ecosystem of integrated technologies.

Recordings for each day of EMUG 2025 are available in the Aries Webinar Catalog. We thank our dedicated members of Aries staff, invited guest panelists, and user community for making EMUG 2025 a success!