It is widely acknowledged that submitting a paper to a journal is a fraught activity for authors. But why should this still be the case? James Hartley and Guillaume Cabanac argue that the process has always been complicated but can, with a few improvements, be less so. By adopting standardised templates and no longer insisting on articles being reformatted, the submission process can quickly be simplified.
The first scientific journal, the Journal des Scavans, was published in Paris in January 1665, hotly pursued by Philosophical Transactions in London in March of the same year. We have come a long way since then – from handwriting to typewriting to electronic submissions.
But some things seem to remain the same. Each submission system creates its own difficulties for authors. And each has its critics. Take, for example, the case of submitting papers to publications of the American Psychological Association. Their “instructions for authors” were first published in six and a half pages in the Psychological Bulletin in 1929. This article was revised in 1944 and 1952 and then book-length revisions were published in 1967, 1974, 1983, 1994, 2001 and 2010. The largest of these editions (2001) contained 29 preliminary pages and 439 pages of instructions. The current 2010 edition initially had to be withdrawn and reprinted because it contained so many errors and confusions.
Today the APA has introduced a computer suite of four programmes under the general heading of APA Style CENTRAL: “a revolutionary new electronic resource for APA style” (including “more than 80 forms for proper reference formatting”). Just this very notion – over 80 forms for “proper reference formatting” – should convince us that things have gone badly wrong in science communication, where the layout of the reference is more important than the reference itself. Drastic simplification is needed.
Nor does it help to solve problems like these by handing them over to the authors to resolve them. But this is what electronic submission systems do. Electronic submissions shift the burden from the publishers to the authors. And in many cases it is apparent that these systems have been designed by computer-based aficionados without any – or sufficient – testing with authors. Recent articles on how to set up electronic journals (for example, here, here, and here) scarcely mention authors or their difficulties. This may not cause too many problems for authors familiar with computers but it is certainly not true for older ones and for those who are visually or physically impaired.
Image credit: Unhappy user by OpenClipart-Vectors (CC0 public domain) via Pixabay.
So what we need is one simple system, rather than the myriad solutions proffered by different publishers and where one has to relearn a new system every time you want to submit (or resubmit) an article to a different journal.
Six ways to achieve this are:
- Authors should be able to submit manuscripts in any (appropriate) format. The Authorea and Overleaf platforms provide in-built templates for most journals.
- Editors and reviewers should consider any manuscript submitted in any (appropriate) format first before deciding whether or not to accept or reject it.
- Rejected articles can be revised and resubmitted to another journal without them first having to be reformatted. Reformatting is time consuming and wastes public funds.
- The text, tables, figures, footnotes and references of accepted articles can be formatted automatically according to the journal’s house style by applying automatic, pre-defined templates.
- Ideally, there should be three or four standard formats for journals that everyone can use, with trivial house-style requirements abolished.
- Finally, there should be an in-house factotum to deal with any enquiries.
For those authors ready to submit their paper, we have prepared a checklist of 20 possible requirements for submitting to a journal papers electronically. Once the paper is ready, and the order of co-authors is agreed upon, prepare separately and have at hand in case you are suddenly asked for it:
- Your password on the journal’s editorial manager, if you are already signed up.
- The postal address of all co-authors.
- The email address of all co-authors.
- The national and international phone numbers of all co-authors.
- The ORCID iD of all co-authors (if appropriate).
- The name of the “corresponding” author who will be sent the proofs.
- A separate title page, with authors’ addresses and emails and the abstract (formatted according to the journal’s style guide).
- Another version of the above without the authors’ names, addresses and emails.
- A list of keywords (or an abstract with these below).
- The names, addresses, and emails of possible referees — just in case you are asked, but this is increasingly unlikely.
- A file of the text and references formatted according to the journal’s style guide (it is helpful here to download a similar paper from the journal to act as a guide when doing this).
- A separate file of tables (in case they are not embedded in the text).
- A separate file of table captions (in case they are treated separately).
- A separate file of figures (in case they are not embedded in the text).
- A separate file of figure captions (in case they are treated separately).
- A graphical abstract (in case you are asked for one).
- A tweetable abstract (in case you are asked for one).
- An archive with the data used in your article.
- A covering letter to the editor.
- Finally, prior to submitting you should ensure you are fully aware of and satisfied with the publishing agreement you may be asked to enter into if your article is accepted, including the rights you will retain as author.
This blog post is based on the authors’ article, “The delights, discomforts, and downright furies of the manuscript submission process”, published Learned Publishing (DOI: 10.1002/leap.1092).
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
About the authors
James Hartley is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychology, Keele University, UK (j.hartley@keele.ac.uk). He is well-known for his text, Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 2008).
Guillaume Cabanac is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toulouse 3, France (Guillaume.cabanac@univ-tlse.fr). He and Prof Hartley are frequent collaborators on matters academic.
There really is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to submit a journal article as a simple word file (in any reasonable format/font/spacing) by email. Most submissions are rejected and most accepted submissions are revised. It is a genuine waste of time to demand authors comply with detailed guidelines to meet the demands of printers when the article will be rejected/revised in any case. Deal with the formatting after it’s been accepted.
This is how newspapers, magazines, most book publishers and almost all online publications work. I happen to think the journal is a doomed medium in any case, but this sort of thing is just hastening their demise.
It seems that conventional journals are association not only with submission difficulties, but also with economic models that favor closed access to their contents. Open access journals that tend to be newly founded may be expected to have more streamlined article manuscript submission and review procedures than their closed access counterparts (http://openscience.com/the-sustainability-of-open-access-publishing-models-past-a-tipping-point/). The growing policy making support for academic open access can thus benefit both individual scholars and scientific communities by minimizing barriers to the communication of scholarly findings.
You might be interested to read our recent article in The Scientist and our earlier correspondence in Nature on this topic. In those articles, we suggest a novel solution to this problem, one that has already garnered a lot of support from both authors and journal editors.
Well customised and managed software supporting editor work is a blessing but it will always have its pros and cons. The Editorial Manager system, which we use in De Gruyter Open, allows, above all, control over the whole process and keeps all involved parties informed. These features allow us to minimise the review periods to less than 50 days (on average) and preserve orders within the deadlines (for both authors and reviewers), submitted files (and their versions) as well as authors details.
Exemplified by the Open Medicine journal, first time submission is very liberal in relation to the text and other element’s form. On the other hand this behaviour is expected from the Open Access journals working in a ‘golden’ model. It saves author’s time and effort, offering more support (e.g. language editing and style advice) later on in the process. After manuscript acceptance a few more rules apply, although their main goal is to produce a quality article which will convey the authors idea and be ‘user friendly’. Most probably automation and AI will soon take care of all the laborious standardisation and formatting, but until then some consensus across journals would be very useful.
In regard to the scary list at the end of the above article, the other way of looking at is as an efficient way to promote authors’ findings. Knowing those requirements from the very beginning, it’s less painful to employ them in the earliest stages of work. Many of them (authors affiliations and contact info, raw data files, personal logins are also there to ensure the possibility of keeping the research findings transparent and protected.
Another thing to note: the instructions to authors should match what is required in the online submission portal. I have yet to find a journal that tells you all that you will need in the Instructions to Authors.
Many journals receive hundreds of ‘chancer’ submissions which bear very little, if any relation to the journal goals. I suspect, as well as everything here, making authors format according to idiosyncratic rules is intended as a filter. There are other ways of doing this. I would give editors the right not just to desk reject, but to ‘desk block’, ie forbid authors from submitting to that journal again for a fixed period.
But this is a very very good piece.
A coda to this piece could also apply to reviewers too. Wherein, you need different login details for each journal, are asked to provide/update contact details before you are able to review.
AND NEVER EVER provide a secondary address which is your personal email for things other than work, unless you want to be harangued about a review over the weekend when you are checking on your tickets for the show.
Over at the journal of Political Ecology, [http://jpe.library.arizona.edu ] run voluntarily by academics with no funding at all, we always ask authors to do their best formatting the final version. But the drafts for refereeing can be in any format, of course – who cares? There are no complex blended pdfs to be created by automated software, like the big 5 companies use for submitted drafts. As long as referees can see all the figures and read the text, it does not matter where they are placed. We also do not use any automated software like LaTeX .
On receipt of the final versions, I simply check the entire text, ironing out remaining grammar issues, and the reference formatting. About 50% of authors have it wrong, but I make the changes rapidly, often adding links to permanent urls of available online versions of articles or chapters to assist our online readers, many of whom are in countries or locations without good access to firewalled material. That’s the sort of service that a non-commercial journal can provide- we go a bit further than MDPI as well, which does make some links in its standardised bibliographies.
Of the six desired procedures mentioned in the article, only one does not apply to us –
“Ideally, there should be three or four standard formats for journals that everyone can use, with trivial house-style requirements abolished.”
– we selected a referencing format years ago that is slightly different to everybody else’s [although more elegant, I thought at the time]. However in order to follow this recommendation, I just need to accept reference lists that are only trivially different from house style – is that correct? Job done, if so.
And, yes, to take up one of the commentators, part of the problem is the ubiquity of online submission systems and complex house rules coming from large publishing corporations with a profit maximization goal. Compared to us, sitting in a cafe editing an article on a laptop, they are processing articles in the hundreds each week and making money from volume and high subscription prices/APCs (e.g. Elsevier has 2500 journals] . They want to save money by passing some labor onto authors. It is less a problem in the humanities but across the board, a really good journal needs to provide textual smoothing/editing, and final reference checking/formatting in my view. Some authors just don’t seem able to do this themselves, particularly if they are not writing in their first language or cannot adapt to the ‘American’ English our journal uses. I read many articles in commercial journals [from engineering, in particular] with poor grammar , yet produced by big publishing houses, that have clearly not been edited well. I was told by a couple of journals that this is this is something they do not do because of time and cost. No wonder the profits of some of these companies are so high! We do it, and we charge nothing.
Agreed that it’s ridiculous to put all these requirements on authors when they whole thing will be ripped up in typesetting anyways. Does anyone have experience with Elsevier’s Your Paper, Your Way program? https://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/your-paper-your-way
Also, just a few things to add to your list:
Ethics statement (who approved animal experiments, how was personal data handled, etc)
Data availability statement (Data can be found at such and such repository, Mendeley Data, Figshare, etc)
Link to the pre-registration, if any
I’m a 60 year old economist, moderately successful. Younger scholars should know that generally you can ignore journal formatting edicts until a paper is published. Ask yourself: how many papers have I told the editor to reject because of formatting? Remember: they want your paper, if it’s good enough.
I disagree with the authors’ idea that all journals should use identical formats. It is a good thing that journals look different. It adds to our culture, and identifies articles. And it is very little trouble— it is even satisfying and fun, in the glory of winning— to fix up the formatting once the paper is accepted.
Worth mentioning the “List of format-free journals”:
https://asntech.github.io/format-free-journals/