Universities have their funding cut, are forced to fire personnel, and now professors have to waste our valuable time on doing the editing of our articles ourselves. This is as productive as hammering nails with a laptop.
I hate this kind of inefficient, pathetic penny – pinching that wastes a lot more than it saves.
They know the price of everything and the value of nothing, it’s why they are called penny pinchers and shop keepers,
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Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing…
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I thought we always had had to edit our own articles. Who else could do it??
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It’s the kind of editing where you adapt the article to the specific template of the journal.
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The journal staff did that back in the times when everything was done on typewriters. Since then it has always been the author’s responsibility. This is an improvement, since the galley proof stage is skipped. In the 1970’s I often had to make corrections to galley proofs because the formatting changed the meaning.
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Really? You always get a preprogrammed template with bits of code in it and 9 pages of single-spaced instructions plus two videos to teach you how to use it? I’ve been on this since the beginning of the week with no end in sight. But that’s the first time I’m encountering something like this. Maybe I’ve been especially lucky to have been spared this until now.
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You always get a preprogrammed template with bits of code in it and 9 pages of single-spaced instructions plus two videos to teach you how to use it?
Usually less than 9 pages for math journals, but yes. Some journals have a macro template that one can use to do the typesetting via LaTeX.
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I publish 3-4 times a year, more if you count review essays, etc., and I have never, ever come across this. I would not think well of a journal that required authors to do their own page-setting. The only difference I’ve noticed over the years is that most of the publishers I work with now use copy editors and page-setters located in India, which has not caused any problems in terms of quality. Is this an open access journal? I could see some smaller open access outfits doing this to keep their costs down (I still think it’s ridiculous).
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I think most mathematicians prefer to have the control over how their published work looks.
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Normally, somebody else does the grunt work, and then I look it over and decide if it’s OK. But to have me waste my time on tracing if the period goes before the quotation mark (and I’m not a mathematician, so the position of the period has no bearing on the meaning) is a total waste of my time. This is very mechanical work. And I should be doing intellectual work.
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I am with David here.In the physical sciences, journals provide templates that are easy to use and from which the publisher extracts raw data for publication when the time comes. Templates usually exist for both MS Word and Latex, but the point is for the author to focus on content and not layout (even though Latex templates usually produce aesthetically pleasing documents anyway). Maybe Clarissa is experiencing the torture to produce a so-called camera-ready manuscript? That sometimes happens with conferences in my field and can be a nightmare, but is always expected to be done by the authors, anyway.
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Speaking of budget cuts, what pisses me off is that they have downsized the staff so much that reimbursements (which we do electronically, mind you, but a human still has to check all receipts and make sure we are not defrauding the federal government that gives us grants by paying $23 and not $20 for dinner) that reimbursements now take forever. So I have to put stuff on my personal card, where it sits for eternity until the overworked staff member comes gets to it.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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