Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates

From: C.J.Smith <C.J.Smith_at_OPEN.AC.UK>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:21:09 -0000

On the topic of the type and extent of errors that copyeditors detect
in journal articles, I have a few points to make.

 

First, while referees obviously need to look out for substantive
errors, these should certainly not be errors of English or grammar.
This is the job of the copyeditor, once the paper has been accepted
for publication. Referees are there to judge the technical content of
the research only, and if the quality of English is too poor for this
to be judged then the paper should be rejected, albeit with
resubmission encouraged once the English has been sorted out by the
authors. For this very reason we are seeing more and more
pre-submission editorial services springing up, catering in
particular for the growth in research in China and the rest of the
Far East (e.g. http://www.asiascienceediting.com/). Let us not forget
that many referees used by journals are not themselves native English
speakers.

 

That said (and I've written about this on this list before),
copyediting is not what it used to be. As publishers seek to drive
down production costs many have begun to use services based in India
and the Far East to manage article processing. Once a paper has been
accepted for publication, in a lot of cases publishers will then not
see that paper again until the corrected proof stage. This is less
true of smaller publishers (e.g. learned societies that still retain
their own standards of editorial control), but it is certainly true
of many commercial publishers operating at larger scales of journals
production.

 

Certainly in the UK (I cannot speak for America), there has been a
trend of less and less work available for the traditional freelance
academic copyeditor. It is no coincidence that you can often pick up
a copy of a journal these days and find it riddled with annoying
mistakes. An Editor-in-Chief of an engineering title whom I worked
with in the past used to be on the phone to me every month
complaining of obvious errors in his journal, even in the titles of
about-to-be published papers. In my opinion, the standard of writing
in scholarly journals has been one of the major victims of its own
rapid expansion.

 

Anyway, the main point I wanted to make is that copyeditors should be
picking up substantive errors, but only substantive errors of English
and grammar. Unfortunately, for reasons described above, this is not
always the case these days, but this is their job and publishers
should be employing the right people to do it. Any technical points
picked up by copyeditors should not be corrected without consultation
- they should be raised as author/editor queries. Referees and
Editors should also be picking up substantive errors, but only
substantive errors of technical content or science. Editors that ask
their referees to correct the English risk being turned down by busy
academics that don't want to do it, plus they may well be duplicating
effort. Most importantly, neither party should be treading on the
turf of the other!  

 

Colin Smith
Research Repository Manager
Open Research Online (ORO)
Open University Library
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA

Tel: +44(0)1908 332971
Email: c.j.smith_at_open.ac.uk
http://oro.open.ac.uk


____________________________________________________________________________


From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 19 January 2009 23:36
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit
Mandates

 

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3_at_psu.edu> wrote:

       

      The only statement in Stevan's commentary that I find
      surprising
      and questionable--because it is stated with such
      certainty of its
      truth, with no reference to any empirical backing, which
      is
      unusual for Stevan--is the claim that it is "exceedingly
      rare"
      (Stevan's emphasis) for copyediting "to detect any
      substantive
      errors" in articles. I have no evidence to disprove this
      claim
      that is based on systematic investigation of my own, but
      in all
      the years I spent as a copyeditor myself, it does not
      ring true,
      and was not consistent with my own experience in editing
      scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences.

 

But Sandy, you were copy-editing books, and I was talking about
journal articles (OA's target content)!

 

And during those years you were copy-editing at Princeton, I was
editing (a journal) at Princeton. My only evidence is from those 25
years: Lots of substantive errors were caught by the editor (me!),
but that was part of the peer review, the editor being a super-peer.
Negligibly few were ever caught by the copy-editors...

 

      Are the sciences any different? Not according to one
      editor who
      has worked on thousands of scientific articles, who
      commented on
      a draft of my article on "The Value Added by Copyediting"
      (Against the Grain, September 2008). Among other things,
      he
      testified that "even in highly technical articles 'the
      equations
      are usually accompanied by thickets of impenetrable
      prose,' and a
      lot of his work 'involves making sure that the text and
      the
      equations say the same thing.' He also adds that he
      checks 'the
      basic math in tables, since it's amazing how often
      scientists get
      the sums and averages wrong.'"

 

There's a lot of awfully bad writing in science, alas, and the
copy-editing is usually so light that it doesn't make the writing
much better. But I said *substantive* errors, and the responsibility
for catching those is the referees' (and editor's), not the
copy-editor's.

 

      A study by Malcolm Wright and J. Scott Armstrong titled
      "Fawlty
      Towers of Knowledge" in the March/April 2008 issue of
      Interfaces
      also found high rates of errors in citations and
      quotations,
      partly because researchers relied on preprints and never
      bothered
      to check the accuracy of citations and quotations from
      those
      preprints. I would consider these "substantive errors,"
      since
      they are not simply matters of style or grammar. So, I
      would ask
      Stevan whence his high degree of confidence in this claim
      derives. Nothing in my experience, or that of other
      editors I
      have asked, bears it out.

 

Sandy and I clearly mean something different by "substantive errors":
I wouldn't consider citation errors substantive (though it's
certainly useful to correct them).  I think citations and even
quotations will be increasingly checked by software, online, as
everything is made OA. But I agree that only the future will decide
how much copy-editing service author/institutions will be prepared to
pay for, if and when journal publishing downsizes to just peer-review
(plus copy-editing) alone.

 

Stevan Harnad

 

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Received on Tue Jan 20 2009 - 12:34:32 GMT

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