Some of you may recall a readers comment before about publishers manually re-typsetting journal submissions: I now believe this wholeheartedly. You see, the paper that is slowly becoming my thesis got accepted to a respectable journal a few weeks ago, and they sent back some proofs to be double checked before printing.
Some errors could have occurred in electronic reformatting, like all the funding references being dropped. Sure. Then there was ^{+3}_{−1}\% becoming ^{+3}_{−1\%}. Fine. Then there was several “<”s becoming “>”s. Hmmmm. Then there is my personal favorite: “Acknowlegments” [sic].
2 responses so far ↓
andy // June 26, 2008 at 11:09 am |
yep, just recently had a paper accepted in APL and they send you the manually copy-edited manuscript back along with the proofs. It’s a scanned version of the manuscript with lovely little squiggles and markings in black pencil all over the place. Apparently then someone types it all in on their own typesetting system…
Homer Wolfe // July 8, 2008 at 3:03 am |
Hi Andy.
Yeah, this seems to be standard practice, but I can’t understand why. I mean, whatever system they use, PDF’s are standardized to the point that it should be possible to write robust conversion scripts. Maybe the extra human attention is designed to force more stringent editing, but this can’t possibly be cost effective. Seems from my experience that it just introduces more error.