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Yvonne Strong has a tough job. Each week, she has to ensure that three different versions of Nature magazine hits the doorsteps of its subscribers at the same time.

That doesn’t sound too tricky, you might think. Well you’d be wrong, because the tough part for Strong is that the 176pp magazine is printed by three different printers on three different continents in three different time zones. This means three lots of PDFs need to be created (some of the copies have region-specific advertising) and three different flatplans.

As production director of Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) UK-based titles (non-academic), Strong works with a team of 16 production staff to make sure that 60,000 copies of the group’s flagship title hit their print slot each time – in addition to looking after a number of other monthly titles and one-off publications.

Past experience
Fortunately for Strong, both the production and editorial teams at NPG are highly disciplined and don’t bust deadlines. She puts this down to the fact that before the days of PDFs, film had to be sent overseas so the magazine has always had good systems in place.

Strong celebrates her 10th year in her role this year and explains that she had held a varied host of jobs before ending up in her current post all of which have served her well. After studying 3D design at college, she joined a print co-operative in Manchester. “We had an A3 and an A4 press. They were ancient machines and we were producing leaflets and flyers for ‘worthy’ campaigns.”

From there, she joined the design unit of a London polytechnic where she worked alongside a designer who taught her about typography, before working for Angel Publishing and then Cornhill Publications in a production capacity.

When she joined Nature in 1997, her remit was to keep things ticking over as they were, but shortly after her tenure had commenced, the “PDF explosion” occurred and she found herself immersed in it.

“At the time, there was no big push to go that way, but we were working with some excellent printers such as Cambrian and Stephens & George, which were at the forefront of the whole thing, so we decided to try it on one of our quarterly publications and it worked very well. It took off pretty quickly across the rest of the group’s titles after that.”

Today, everything is done via PDF. Worldwide and regional advertising all comes to the central production hub in London where it is flight-checked by the team to make sure that the PDF meets group specifications. All of the ad pages are then collated with editorial (including a contents panel for the Japanese edition translated into the native language) and shipped out to the relevant printers.

Ripped proofs are then produced so that the pages can be approved online – press passing is out of the question given the impracticalities of time and distance. “It’s quite a job monitoring that process and making sure that we are printing the right job in the right region,” says Strong.

Informal contract agreements are in place with all of the group’s print partners, which are regularly reviewed. “We’re always market-testing in terms of price, but I’m loathe to move the work elsewhere because if you get a high level of service and understanding, then you really don’t want to go changing things,” she says.

To emphasise this point, Strong cites an incident that occurred last year. At the end of the street where NPG is headquartered is a big building site, which will eventually be occupied by The Guardian newspaper. Last year, there was a fire on the site and the fire brigade feared that the blaze might spread to some gas canisters, so the whole area had to be evacuated.

This was on Monday, the day before Nature goes to press and also the day when a lot of the sections of the magazine are sent. Emergency office and production space was set aside in one of the publishing group’s other London offices and the team worked late into the night.

“The last pages went at quarter to two on Wednesday morning, whereas normally we clear them at 3pm, but the magazine still came out on time and we wouldn’t have been able to achieve that without our suppliers,” says Strong.

Nature’s UK printer of choice is St Ives Plymouth (Wyndeham Heron prints the fortnightly 22,000 circulation British Dental Journal that Strong also looks after on its web presses) and in the US, she uses the family-owned Publishers Press, which is based in Kentucky and has been on board for the past five years.

“We go out to visit them once a year just to check what new equipment they have invested in, but we speak to them all the time and they are doing a fantastic job for us.”

Breaking down barriers
She concedes that time and language differences could be a problem for the magazine’s Japanese print run, which is handled by Obun Printing Company in Tokyo, were it not for the fact that NPG has a Tokyo office. This means that while the production may be undertaken in the UK, all communication with the printer is dealt with by the local team.

The print split is 20,000 UK, 32,000 US and 8,000 in Japan with the US being the cheapest place to print and Japan being the most expensive, but Strong explains: “If you take into account shipping, it’s still cheaper to print there for the Far East market.”

As well as maintaining these relationships and juggling the firm’s annual £3.5m print spend, one of Strong’s other key tasks is looking after the raft of publications and research journals that the group launches, with run lengths varying from a couple of thousand through to 10,000.

Most of this work is printed in the States, but production is still handled from the UK office. “We work with suppliers who have Cut Star presses because they are much more flexible and can ramp up easily from 2,000 to 10,000.”

Nothing is printed in mainland Europe as yet, but Strong refuses to rule this possibility out and says that each job is considered on its own merits. Another area being explored is the environmental credentials of the group’s paper usage.

“Most companies now recognise these sorts of issues and we are talking with our main paper supplier,
M-real, about this.”

Colour consistency
Paper also plays a part in one of Strong’s main gripes – consistent colour standards. The Japanese edition of Nature is printed on a sheetfed press and uses different stock to the US and UK version.

“I drive the printers nuts because I am constantly asking them for density measurements,” says Strong. “But on the big web presses with closed-loop colour controls and with the longer runs, you have more of a chance of getting it right.”

So what of the future? Is the group committed to printed versions of its titles? After all, nature.com hosts the online editions of all NPG publications, achieves more than 20m hits per month and has more than 1.8m registered users. Strong believes that the group has been very creative and forward-thinking in the way that it uses the web to complement the print editions of its titles and although she thinks that e-paper may have an impact when online becomes portable, ultimately their sponsors and advertisers still want a printed product.

“I think that print runs will probably go down at some point in the future, but there will always be some call for print,” she concludes.

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NATURE FACTFILE
• Nature magazine was launched in 1869 by its first editor Sir Norman Lockyer
• It was a further 123 years before the company launched its first Nature research journal, Nature Genetics, but today it produces nine such titles, in addition to seven Nature Reviews journals and four Nature Clinical Practice titles
• Nature Publishing Group (NPG) was born in 1999 incorporating the scientific journal publications of Macmillan: Nature; the Nature research journals; and NPG academic journals (formerly Stockton Press)
• NPG is a subsidiary of the global publishing group Macmillan Publishers, which is itself owned by German-based family-run media company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
• NPG employs a workforce of more than 400 based in a number of global offices in places such as London, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Munich, Tokyo and Basingstoke

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HUMAN GENOME COLLECTIONS
One of the trickiest titles that Strong has had to deal with during her tenure was a publication covering the sequencing of the human genome.

Nature had been closely following research into the subject and had published a draft sequence in 2001, but it was decided to pull this information together in one publication entitled the Human Genome Collections, as something that its readers could store and refer back to.

The publication needed to include an accurate usable reproduction of DNA sequencing of chromosomes and due to the size of such a chart, the only way to accommodate this was through roll folds, which made the publication a major challenge to print and bind. Amazingly the 308pp title, plus cover, was turned around in two weeks with St Ives printing it on 80gsm gloss paper (the cover was 250gsm). It had a print run of 30,000, weighed nearly a kilo, included 14 roll folds and was perfect bound.

“For St Ives, the creation of this title was quite a feat – they even had to bring in an extra binding hopper,” says Strong. “We were all really proud of it.”

Most copies of the title went to companies that sponsored the venture, but it was also available
on request to Nature subscribers and interested parties could also buy copies.