What is Continuous Publishing?
A New Model to Dramatically Speed the Publishing Process
In the manufacturing world, drugs are often produced using a serial process with stops and starts between steps. Increasingly, companies are adopting “continuous manufacturing” to improve the speed and quality of drug production.
In the regulatory world, dossier publishing can and should go through a similar transformation with the adoption of “continuous publishing.” Since continuous publishing isn’t a common term, I wanted to describe what it means and how it can improve submission delivery.
Traditional publishing is a serial process. First there is a submission plan; then individual documents are authored and reviewed. Approved documents are transferred to a publishing tool where publishers add PDF navigation and QC the documents. Publishers then compile and validate the submission until it is clean for delivery.
In the continuous model, publishing activities—such as adding bookmarks and navigation—are moved upstream with content creation. Other activities—such as hyperlink testing, XML compilation, and validation—are automated and running behind the scenes from the very start.
One benefit of the continuous model, is that quality is built into the process. Issues are identified earlier when they are easier to fix. A second benefit, is that there is less work to do at the end. If publishing activities are happening throughout content development, there is very little left to do when the last document gets approved.
Much like in the manufacturing world, continuous manufacturing wasn’t possible until the technology existed to support it. Technology silos have resulted in a serial publishing process. In order to create documents and publish in tandem, the publishing and document management applications must be working on the exact same copy of the document. When documents are transferred between systems, the documents must first be approved and deemed “ready-for-publishing” before publishing can begin. When the two systems are unified, there are no document transfers. Authors and publishers are working on the same documents, with the same metadata, at the same time.
The introduction of Veeva Vault Submissions Publishing will unify submission authoring, publishing, and archival within Veeva Vault RIM to deliver a continuous publishing process for life sciences companies. Continuous publishing will speed submission delivery and bring a little peace of mind during submission crunch-times.
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