Why I dread submitting papers
Today I have mostly been writing a paper. It’s pretty nice, and I feel quite pleased with it because it shows something I wasn’t expecting. On the other hand my heart is sinking because I know what is coming shortly. I am going to have to submit it for publication.
Scientists are expected to have a pretty wide range of skills. An enquiring mind and understanding of the scientific method: they should come as standard. But to that you have to add things like specific laboratory expertise, maths and statistics, often a good dollop of programming talent, and perseverance (to a pretty high power). And that is before you finish your PhD. Then come the ever mounting demands of presenting your data, managing your finances (not to mention managing people!) writing papers and grants, reviewing other people’s papers and grants, and yet more perseverance. Eugh.
And at some point journal editors decided that we needed an extra set of hoops. I cannot say how much I fear those words ‘Instructions for authors’. They mean ‘Huge pain in the arse for authors’.
I mean, I am a scientist, not a bloody graphic designer. Some of the instructions for handling images are completely impenetrable to me. Down the corridor there is a computer which is specifically maintained with an old retro version of Powerpoint because in more recent versions it is not possible to save the file in a sufficiently resolved format to be acceptable to some journals. And what’s with this from PLoS?
“…we cannot accept for review or revision any documents created in Microsoft Office 2007, even if “saved down” to the 2003 version.”
There follows some guff about how changes in the new version of Word are
“incompatible with the established workflow processes of many publishers…”
Now I don’t know exactly what an established workflow process is, but it sounds very much like they just can’t be arsed to change things around. Note that I can think of many publishers who do NOT have this problem.
And this isn’t even the point. Check out that statement again; “…cannot accept for review or revision”. They’re insisting on this before they’ve even agreed to publish it! That’s what really gets my goat about scientific publishing. You know as well as I do that an awful lot of papers don’t get into the first journal they go to. That means you have to sit down, and reformat your paper – shaving a few words off the abstract here, changing the titles of the sections there, and then letting your reference management software crash your computer multiple times as you try to get the sodding references in the right format (like many of you, I have stayed up all night re-inserting references over and again in the face of this scourge. Again, I have laptops which have old versions of this software on, because I trust only them to not paralyse my PC*)
And then you sit down with the web based submissions system, where you have to enter every author, and their address, and their phone number. Again.
Why is there not a single format for initial submissions? Better than that, why are all initial submissions not done in pdf? You can make them on your own computer and send them direct. If somebody does not happen to have Acrobat, then the online tools can be used, but as an exception. I can’t understand this. If the Natures and Sciences want to keep up their policy of splitting papers into an often absurdly short summary of results, which is then linked to the supplementary material where the real paper is, then that is fine. But everybody else…?
This has been a long winded way of getting around to this link. It’s not strictly about submitting an article, being instead about a dreadful experience trying to get a journal to accept a technical comment, but in several ways it resonates with my point above (thanks to João Carrico for bringing my attention to it via Twitter).
*Mac users – don’t start
“*Mac users – don’t start”
Didn’t. Say. A. Word.
There was just a call to arms about this somewhere, in a lovely letter to the editor. It was either Nature or The Scientist, but I can’t find it now. The authors were proposing a universal template for all papers. It seemed like a really sound idea.
Hoping the whole publishing industry will agree on a standard is, er, optimistic, at least for the time being. Though the USA’s National Library of Medicine does have a document format (the NLM’s XML DTD) that is nearly a standard, and good for putting full articles into PubMed Central. But as an author, you don’t want to be dealing with it.
More likely to give a win to both publishers and authors are authoring tools (Microsoft Word or whatever) that let you save your article in whatever form the publisher wants. The publisher gives you a settings file, and you export your article using it. Nobody (you, journal production staff) need to faff around reformating references etc. There are extra cherries — these sorts of authoring tools would also make it much easier for you to mark-up your document semantically – “when I write ‘flu, I mean this particular disease about which, therefore, all this other information is pertinent”.
I wish there were a universal format for figures, that’s for sure. Also that digital vs print colours weren’t different. So long as there are so many different forms of illustration (gels, half-tones, colours, galaxies, line drawings) and so many gee whizzeries that authors love to use in creating them….shading, tinting, 3D effects, etc …well, it is a headache.
As for the Word issue – MS is a software house whose product is primarily for business users. They released a completely new version of Word, incompatible with all previous, without any consultation with the publishing or other “third party” industries. The publisher for example has editing macros and typesetting codes embedded in the workflow. Yes, it coudl change all that for a particualr version of a MS product, but who is to say that the company won’t bring out another incompatible version a year later? Who will bear the cost of the changes that a publisher has to make (autohrs, readers?). At the end of the day, the publishing industry and MS did have a set of meetings and a compromise was reached – MS issued some kind of patch for users to render 2007 word back-compatible – so I think the instructions you cite are out of date or perhaps the journal doesn’t know about this (see MS website).
Publishing scientific journals does have its complicated aspects, as does everything. And it all gets increasingly technical – and author expectations get increasingly higher!
PS and I should have mentioned, if the publisher upgraded all its workflows to the new Word, what about all the many authors and institutions who had not purchased it (yet) but then would have to? I would like to have a universal submission format that all scientific disciplines are happy to use and that works for all the publishers….but what?
yeah, despite my characteristically ranting tone, I recognise a lot of this. And in fact have recently submitted a paper to a PLoS journal which was written in word 2007 (so far, they seem not to have noticed. It would be nice if they updated the instrcutions to authors!)
But I just don’t get why you have to do this sort of thing at initial submission. Once something is accepted then I think it is reasonable to ask for it to be formatted, but not at submission. About the only stipulation should be length.
Matt, I like the idea of that template – it does for papers what EndNote has done for references – and who would ever want to go back to the bad old days before reference managing programmes? It sounds like a brilliant idea.
Um, why no mention of LateX yet? 🙂
Something more user friendly would probably be more useful.
I think Jenny answered this.
I admire LateX, but reckon expecting us to all become versed in it is a big ask.
I also have to report that at the last two meetings I went to, the longest delays in setting up, and due to marvellous animations not quite working right, were both from presentations in LateX.
Yep, everyone’s latex is different and so even more of the kind of issues Bill mentions in his post. Come to think of it, the letter Jenny refers to in her comment was written by a LaTeX person, if memory serves.
LaTeX is for geeks. It’s not a productivity tool for scientists, bottom line.
Why *should* ‘normal’ scientists learn it?
LaTeX is really a great way to typewrite but it has a steep learning curve for the ones like myself used to the WYSIWYG editors (aka MS Word).
I finally conceded using it for my last paper because the students doing the word were well versed in it, as they were computer scientists and for them it is even unthinkable to use MS Word! All the Computer Science conferences accept papers in LaTeX and they are automatically camera-ready.
Concerning the universal figure format, nowadays I’ve decided to export everything to .eps (Encapsulated Post Script) as it can easily be converted to pdf. The reason of my choice: the use of LaTeX, as it integrated the eps figures flawlessly.
But more on topic of the article: I still remembered the first paper I’ve submitted, spent an extra week formating the figures, tables etc as the journal required… trying to get software that does CMYK tiffs with x DPI and y number of colors etc etc… In the end, I passed all the tests on the software they provided to validate the figures.. and went on to submit the paper. When I complained in a latter letter to the editor about the process, the answer was: Oh sorry, don’t bother in the future, just select “For review purposes only” and say yes to everything . Later on you will be contacted if any changes are necessary…
How disappointing! I do hope they changed their instructions.
[…] just ‘don’t work’, to use the technical term. To put it another way, I have noticed a particular facility in my reference management software for magnificently buggering up my manuscripts. Is this because […]
MS Word is for morons who think it’s a ‘productivity tool’ for scientists.