A tool for submitting the same article to multiple publishers

[hmstepanek]

Problem
Authors have to fill out lots of redundant forms when submitting work to multiple archives, repos, journals. They often go through a lot of work to format it in a particular way and provide the publisher required metadata during the submission process and then have to repeat this process all over again for a different publisher. Even when publishers use the same submission tool, they often require different metadata which means the author has to fill it all out again, providing slightly different information.

Solution
A tool that handles this for authors, via a current db of requirements of different submissions, and a [browser plugin?].

1. Auto-generate as much of this data as possible from the draft item / preprint / DOI (whatever is available)
2. Maintain a list of reqiured and optional fields for major submission targets (crowd-updates + review)
3. Maintain a crosswalk between similar fields in different forms (both full and partial maps).
4. Offer authors some simple filter of the sorts of submissions they care about, to simplify what they fill out. Start w/ the most universal
5. Integrate w/ the submission forms for the few inputs that need to be done by the author by hand (signing COI + other forms?)
6. Confirm author identity: Send email (same process used by many submission processes now)
7. Write a browser plugin that tracks this that you (the author) can carry with you
8. Simplify the above (particularly B) by coordinating a common schema for submission forms.
9. Maintain a github repo and website to publicize this.

[hmstepanek]

This is really identifying a gap in our existing tool space. There have been a fair number of attempts to come up with a common data schema but I think this is something a little different or beyond that, while it does have a common data schema it takes in all the information and then calls/fills out all of these existing submission tools and passes in the data that the author provided. I also like the idea that this could just be a plugin that auto-fills out the forms as opposed to trying to call all the different tools.