Scientists Don't Want New Careers in Desktop Publishing

To save money, publishers of scientific journals have outsourced much of their graphic design, typesetting, and clerical work to a cheap source of labor—you!

Nowadays we who want our research papers published are usually required to prepare the camera-ready article, which means using programs like LaTex, supplying Figures in the proper electronic size and format, inserting them into the text, and following pages and pages of rules. Worse yet, for submission, we can't simply send a readable document via mail or e-mail. We must use the journals' own websites to set up an account, log in, wade through all their windows, and hope a glitch or improper keystroke doesn't force us to start all over again. This process takes time away from what we should be doing: science.

The publishers claim that their new system is better—better for whom? For them. They don't have to hire people to do layout and typesetting. Where are all these savings going? Have your page charges been reduced lately?

From my experience as a scientist, editor of many proceedings, and the former atmospheric optics editor for the Journal of the Optical Society of America A, I have some recommendations.

Journal publishers should allow all papers to be submitted by e-mail as a single file containing the complete paper—text, Figures, tables, references, everything. A PDF (portable document format) file makes sense, but there should be enough flexibility to accept at least the two or three most frequently used word-processing programs. This one file can then travel by e-mail to the referees, who can read the paper and comment on it.

Scientists should not be required to meet journals' formatting or submission demands beyond the single electronic file. They should have no forms to fill out, no uploading and downloading, no templates, no logging onto websites and _1fighting with the publisher's system, no overhead in putting Figures into a certain format or size. The author should have to do nothing beyond actually producing a readable paper in electronic form.

Similarly, the referees should not be asked to fill out a web-based form. In fact, there should be no forms at all. Referees could simply send an e-mail to the editor with their comments and recommendations. Editors may prompt the referees with questions like "Does the paper present new and significant scientific results?" but they and their editorial system should not require that forms be filled out. Editors should be able to judge from a referee's free-form response what to do. Isn't that the editor's job?

Finally, when the time comes for publication, authors should be able to send in their finished document and revised Figures in any common format—for example, Microsoft Word or TIFF (tagged image file format). It should be up to the journals to take this input and produce the final typeset paper. That's how it used to work.

Scientists are not in the profession of desktop publishing. They would rather spend their time doing research than doing work that the journals ought to, and used to, do themselves. More science would get done.