In this Bellows post, we’ll be revealing what we have in store for authors.

We are revamping our whole approach to biographies and citations, if you are an author who has published with us before, or a new author looking to publish their first articles with us, we want to hear from you.

So what is in store?

We will be separating the biographies from the article content. At the moment biographies are embedded into each article and if we needed to change a bio across the entire site a Forge staff member would need to edit each article manually. In the new system you, the authors, would be able to log in and manage your own biographies and additional information.

What will be available?

You will be able to manage the following Items:

• Service (optional as we aren’t all members of the ADF)
• Rank (optional)
• Personal names and Family name
• Post-nominals (optional)
• Image - select a service emblem or upload a photo (Not really ‘optional’ as a default blank head will be used if you don’t select anything and any uploads will need to be moderated against the image upload policy - which has yet to be written)
• Short biography - Maximum ~100 words to be used at the end of your articles (moderated to ensure no Official Sensitive or higher information is included)
• Long Biography - Maximum ~1000 words to be used only on your personal Bio Page (Yes, you will have your own page - but also moderated to ensure that no Official Sensitive, or higher, information is included) 
• Optional social media links. Initially, we will allow you to specify LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, however, if we get enough requests we will consider adding more.
• A selection (three or four) of your articles, shown as cards (art and title), and a link to a list that contains all of your articles.

Any changes requiring moderation may take a couple of working days to be approved, but all other changes will be instantaneous.

The next thing that is important to Authors is the change to our Privacy Policy. We need to update the privacy policy because we are changing how we collect, hold and use your personal information.

As you can see from the above the collection will contain all of the information you already share with us, just in a more structured manner, with the addition of photos and long biographies. We will continue to share that information with our readers in the form of article attributions.

We will also be introducing a service that allows students to add your article to citation services easily. Your Service, rank, name, and post-nominals will be shared along with the usual data to create a standard citation. To make this work we will be required to share your name, rank, post-nominals and the name of the article with third-party companies that provide the citation services. You will be required to acknowledge this use of your personal data as part of the publishing agreement.

We are also working on allowing TurnItIn to be able to access all the articles on the Forge to prevent people from plagiarising your work. This will involve allowing the TurnItIn engine to ‘scrape’ the site and add all the articles to their database. Note that they will only be able to access the data published on the site so they will not be able to see your email address and will not be able to contact you directly. They will only be able to contact the Forge, and if necessary, we will involve you should the need arises.

So that is pretty much it. You will have a login to manage your personal author biographies; you will have new items to put in your biographies; your works will be protected from plagiarism and students will be able to cite your works more easily.

So, how are we doing? Let us know through the Forge Feedback form!