Our work

Medical publishing platform

A Drupal publishing platform for peer-reviewed medical journals, with structured archives and search across decades of articles.

Client
Scientific publishing house
Type
Portals
Year
2023

The challenge

Decades of peer-reviewed articles sat in an unsupported platform with inconsistent metadata. Editors worked around the system rather than in it, readers could not reliably find an article they knew existed, and the security posture of the installation had become a genuine risk.

The technical solution

We rebuilt the platform on Drupal, treating the migration as a restructuring exercise rather than a copy, and designed the editorial workflow around how the review process actually runs.

  • Drupal content architecture modelling journals, issues, articles, authors and affiliations as first-class entities
  • Migration that normalised metadata and preserved every existing citation URL
  • Editorial workflow with submission, peer review, revision and publication states, and per-role permissions
  • Elasticsearch-backed search across full text, authors, keywords and the full back catalogue
  • Hardened, monitored infrastructure with a defined update policy

Tech stack used

  • Drupal
  • PHP
  • Elasticsearch
  • Ubuntu

The outcome

  • A single structured archive replacing inconsistent legacy metadata
  • Peer review managed inside the platform instead of over email
  • Historical citation links preserved through the migration
  • Supported, patched infrastructure with a documented update policy

Platforms in daily use.

Back to all work

Tell us what you want to build.

Send us the shape of the problem. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it, and what it would take.

Start your projecthola@xiondesigns.com