Editage launches Ada, the automated document assessment solution for academic publishers

Note: Since the acquisition of UNSILO by Cactus Communications, Ada by Editage has been merged into UNSILO Evaluate.

(May 18, 2018; Philadelphia, U.S.) - The scholarly communications landscape is quickly adopting new technologies and integrating automated solutions to make things easier for publishers. Editage launches Ada, an Automated Document Assessment solution specifically designed to assess scientific content in research papers.

Ada is named after Ada Lovelace, who worked on Babbage’s Analytical Engine and is regarded as the first computer programmer. Ada automatically assesses the quality of a submitted research manuscript vis-à-vis its readability and adherence to certain ethical requirements, saving time and effort required at multiple stages of the publication process. Unlike other automated assessment tools, Ada has specifically been designed to assess scientific content and offers unmatched levels of customization.

Nishchay Shah, Vice President, Technology, Cactus Communications explained how Ada works, “It is actually very simple. Ada accepts text as input and outputs a quality score that allows publishers to green flag the paper for peer review. We allow publishers to customize their database and rulesets, which means the solution can be customized to a particular journal or subject area. The publisher can even customize the stringency of the assessment for different journals, paper types, or stage of publication cycle. Ada ingests raw text, which means it is file type agnostic; this enables Ada to be used on all submission formats. It is API based and built on a robust infrastructure that ensures any existing tools or processes at the editorial office can communicate with Ada almost instantaneously.”

In addition to language checks, Ada also does ethical declaration checks, which can be customized per journal, and additional content checks can be easily added. Journals can even send feedback to authors if their manuscripts are not up to the standard. An exponential increase in the number of submissions and published papers has made automation the need of the hour as publishers aim for a shorter publication cycle. Smaller, niche publishers and open access publishers can scale up easily using Ada. We believe Ada will usher in a new wave of automation in the scholarly communication industry.