Edward Elgar Publishing, one of the UK’s leading independent academic & professional publishers, and Deanta, a renowned publishing solutions provider, today announced a strategic partnership that will allow Edward Elgar to license Deanta’s AI XML-first production workflow platform, Lanstad.
This partnership enables Edward Elgar, winner of the 2023 IPG Independent Publisher of the Year award, to proudly maintain its independent publisher status and continue to manage production of its annual 600+ books and journal titles via its UK-based teams, but now with the transformative use of the Lanstad platform.
Lanstad’s AI-powered tools allow publishers to retain their independence while delivering a best-in-class experience for their authors and staff. By simplifying or automating elements of traditional production tasks like project management, typesetting, copyediting, author proofing, and indexing, Lanstad helps create the capacity publishers need to grow.
Key highlights of the partnership include:
- A 5-year partnership to license Lanstad
- Full 24/7 support function provided by Deanta
- Collaborative development roadmap to continually enhance the partnership
Tim Williams, Managing Director of Edward Elgar, said: “Since our founding 40 years ago, we have distinguished ourselves through exceptional service to authors and high production quality. Recommendations from our authors to their colleagues have been crucial to our growth. Our long-term partnership with Deanta will allow us to continue managing production in-house, maintaining our industry-leading service, while utilising new technologies to stay cost-competitive with those who off-shore their work.
The pilot program received excellent feedback from authors, who appreciated the faster production times. While we do not expect technology to replace skilled human editors, our copyeditors and proofreaders benefited from automating some of the more tedious technical tasks, allowing them to focus on enhancing the language quality of the final publication.
We were highly impressed by Deanta’s collaborative approach to developing Lanstad, their responsiveness in making improvements to meet our needs, and their understanding of the importance of protecting our authors’ intellectual property while implementing new technologies. It truly feels like they are part of the Elgar team.”
Darren Ryan, CEO of Deanta, said: “We are very proud of this partnership with Edward Elgar, which is a powerful reflection on the progress that we are making to transform the way production is managed across this industry. Independent publishers, like Edward Elgar, are a critical part of the publishing landscape, and we hope that this partnership allows them to retain their independence by providing a future-proof technological foundation for their operations.”
The partnership begins immediately for Edward Elgar’s books programme.
