Whether you are new to Lectora® or Lectora Online or you’re an expert user, you may not know that your copy of Lectora and Lectora Online come with free access to ReviewLink™, an online collaboration tool that allows you to share titles for review with external reviewers, subject matter experts and other stakeholders. There’s no sign-up necessary—all you need is a Lectora or Lectora Online License and an email address!
Using ReviewLink you can:
- Publish your titles directly to ReviewLink and invite external reviewers to review the content online.
- Ask reviewers to log in to view your published content and submit comments. Since ReviewLink is web-based, reviewers do not need licenses of Lectora—an email address is all that’s required to log in.
- Review comments that have been submitted and determine items in your title that need to be fixed or updated.
- Make the necessary changes in Lectora and republish your updated title to ReviewLink.
- Mark comments as fixed and notify reviewers of the updated content.
- Allow reviewers to confirm that the changes address their comments.
- Repeat this process to significantly reduce the time and effort required to complete the review cycle.
Publish to ReviewLink
To begin using ReviewLink, select ReviewLink from the Publish drop-down on the Home ribbon. If you have not already created an account on ReviewLink, Lectora will prompt you for an email address and password. From then on, your Lectora license and your email address will serve to authenticate your account.
Once you’ve entered the sign-on information, you can click OK to continue to your publish options. You’ll need to provide some information before you upload your content:
- Reviewers: Specify the email addresses of the people you would like to add as reviewers on ReviewLink. You can invite as many reviewers as you’d like. Simply enter in the appropriate email addresses separated by commas.
- Due Date: You can also choose whether or not to associate a due date with the published title. This lets your reviewers know they need to have their comments submitted by a certain date.
Click OK to publish your title. Lectora and Lectora Online will go through the usual publish process. When that has completed successfully, select Upload Title to send your content to ReviewLink. When the upload process has completed, you can view your title in ReviewLink. Click the ReviewLink button to launch ReviewLink. Alternatively, using a QR Code reader, scan the QR Code in the Publish Title for Review window to quickly launch ReviewLink.
Reviewers: Review Content and Submit Comments
The reviewers you’ve invited to your content will receive an email invitation with the necessary information and links. When reviewers log into ReviewLink, they will generally follow this workflow:
- Use the My Content to Review tab to access all of the content they’ve been invited to review.
- Select the Review Content button to open the published title in a separate window.
- For each page of the title, use the expandable pane to submit new comments, attach relevant resources and view comment threads left by other reviewers.
- Use the Comments Tab to review all submitted comments, and further filter by status, content or reviewer.
- Use the I am Done Reviewing button to let the publisher know they have completed the initial review.
Use the “My Content to Review” tab to launch published titles, view comments and more.
Launched Content has a Comment Pane for submitting and reviewing comments.
The Comments tab allows you to sort, filter and review the comments you and other reviewers have provided.
Publisher: Review Existing Comments
Once you’ve finished collecting comments, you can use the Comments tab in ReviewLink to sort, filter and view the notes left by your reviewers. Make any necessary changes to your title in Lectora or Lectora Online, and republish to ReviewLink. Lectora and Lectora Online will update the version of the title so that all comments remain intact in ReviewLink, but you can choose to publish your title as a separate content item if you choose. You can also choose to mark all New comments to Fixed or make these changes to the individual comments back in ReviewLink.
Complete the Review Cycle
Now that the content has been updated in ReviewLink, it’s up to your reviewers to verify any comments you’ve marked as Fixed. They can do this by launching the updated content and marking comments with a status of OK or Not OK.
You can then update any comments marked as OK to an Archived status so that it will no longer be considered active. For comments marked as Not OK, you can repeat the review cycle by making changes in your Lectora title and republishing to ReviewLink.
Once you and your reviewers have completed the review cycle, you can choose to export all comments to a CSV or PDF file, and then delete the content.
This article last reviewed July, 2017. The software may have changed since the last review.