Ty for the reply.
Not comfortable sharing location info, and I know state laws vary. I do know that our state has a law on the books prohibiting withholding pay based on time entry, because my union rep pushed back when I kept not getting paid because a supervisor was forgetting to approve time.
This is similar, because its the final approval process, but the work has been done, taken out of her hands and finalized. Not to mention, she waits weeks sometimes for them to get off their hands and allow her to upload.
No known contacts in the field other than her coauthors. This is her second year doing this, which is her dream job, and its opening doors for her.
Definitely, it could be automated. But part of the problem is the text box that handles the pasted data inserts characters that are not present in the final work. We’ve tried dumping to plaintext several different ways and looking for hidden characters, but it still occurs. Thus, it would still require human review. Double quotes could likely be filtered, but who gets paid to develop the automation? She wouldn’t know how to debug or validate the code, and she shouldn’t have to.
She knows this isn’t her ultimate dream job, but she is getting paid to write, and getting your own stuff published is a lot of work, luck, and who you know. She’s meeting lots of insiders, but struggling with these constraints.
The Chinese owners seem to discourage all communication between writers. They did however just acknowledge the difficulties the writers face with this platform tool.
This whole operation just smells to me like Chinese work ethic (work them till they jump out the windows, then put nets under the windows) to me. There have been two “supervisors” in the past 16 months that have come and gone. They used to buffer requests and pish to open submission on time, but then they resign without word.