Publishing Project Coordinator

At Sword Technologies, we support our clients in their digital transformation projects by contributing to high value-added missions within demanding environments. We place particular emphasis on the quality of the assignments we offer, as well as on supporting our employees in their professional development.

As part of our continued growth, we are looking for a Publishing Project Coordinator to strengthen our technical teams.

Mission:

Working with the publishing team at one of our clients, you will coordinate academic and research publications from accepted manuscript to dissemination. Your objective will be to keep multiple titles progressing to schedule while maintaining publication quality and recognised scholarly publishing standards.

You will organise production schedules and coordinate authors, editors, reviewers, designers, typesetters, printers and other service providers.

This includes checking submissions against publishing guidelines, verifying templates and visual assets, and maintaining milestones, responsibilities and progress in the workflow management tool. You will coordinate internal reviews and approvals, record decisions, monitor supplier quotations and deliverables, and identify risks or delays early with practical proposals to resolve them.

You will prepare and quality-check publication metadata, including titles, contributors, abstracts, keywords, subjects, funding information, licences and references. Your responsibilities will also cover ISBN/ISSN and DOI assignment, registration and deposit, alongside the coordination of multilingual editions and their metadata.

Applying the client’s open access and copyright policies, you will support contributor and co-publication agreements, permissions, attribution and disclaimer wording. You will also contribute to accessibility and archiving practices.

To support dissemination, you will review existing channels, identify gaps and ensure publications are promptly available in the client’s repository or digital library with complete metadata. You will provide backup for the colleague managing relationships and file and metadata distribution to open access platforms, aggregators, indexing and discovery services.

You will suggest practical improvements to publishing tools and systems, including workflow management and ONIX feeds. You will also develop the ability to prepare enriched publication pages for authors whose texts are not handled by internal editors. Sharing practical knowledge through short sessions and keeping colleagues informed of relevant scholarly publishing developments, including open access policies and AI guidance for research, will form part of the assignment.

Must have:

• Bachelor’s degree in publishing, information science, library science, communications or a related field.

• 2–5 years of experience in academic, scholarly or research publishing, including hands-on coordination of publication projects or production workflows.

• Experience with open access publishing.

• Working knowledge of copyright principles, Creative Commons licences, including IGO licences, permissions and rights clearance for third-party content.

• Hands-on experience with DOI registration and metadata deposit, and ISBN/ISSN.

• Working knowledge of the scholarly publishing ecosystem, including aggregators, indexing and abstracting services, discovery systems, libraries and repositories.

• Experience coordinating authors, editors and external suppliers such as typesetters, designers, printers and publishing platforms.

• Ability to plan and track several publications simultaneously, work independently with limited supervision, and resolve issues proactively.

• Strong attention to detail and publication quality.

• Clear communication, including explaining publishing concepts to non-specialists, and willingness to coach colleagues and share knowledge.

• Ability to collaborate effectively in a multicultural, multilingual environment.

• Proficiency in English.

Nice to have:

• Master’s degree or professional publishing qualification.

• Familiarity with XML standards such as JATS, BITS and ONIX, and production platforms or manuscript management systems.

• Experience with multilingual publishing and translation workflows.

• Knowledge of accessibility standards for digital publications and digital preservation services.

• Experience in an intergovernmental organisation, UN system entity, international financial institution or international research institute.

• Editorial experience, including basic editing or web page design and content.

• Ability to communicate in French