Cost of ‘reformatting’ prompts a call for journals to change their requirements
nature.com
nature.com
The problem of switching to another journal is also overplayed in the essay, at least in my field. I don't know of many people who "shop" for journals to accept their work. Usually you know the right journal, and if the paper is rejected you just give up on it. Perhaps this is discipline-specific, though. (The essay is restricted to biomedical fields.)
As a reviewer, I've never spent any time on journal rules. If the paper gets accepted, it's up to the technical editor to impose rules.
Most authors employ the proper latex stylesheets from the first rough draft. They also use section headings that fit the journal's conventions, and so forth.
I suppose it is possible that people in biomedical fields (are there any here on HN?) tend to submit to multiple journals before their work is accepted. But I sort of doubt that reviewers reject papers based on things like italics or citation formatting, so if folks are submitting to a lot of journals, maybe their work just isn't highly regarded by their peers.
Basically there is no issue here, at least in my field. It's an unconvincing essay, and not one that encouraged me to waste time looking up the original work.
There are still missing features compared to latex, but what exists seems so much more intuitive.
That is a very broad statement. Do you have any data to back it up?
Do you suggest that it was used in the past but that has changed? If so, why?
Not true. IEEE, one of the largest professional orgs, accepts Latex. So does ACM, a huge comp sci org. I'm not familiar with others, but wouldn't be surprised if many others still accept Latex.
Latex is a giant pain to use - and i say this as someone who still uses it to write scientific articles. Services like overleaf exist but that is sometimes not an option with proprietary work.
Aerospace generally does too.
Computer vision seems to.
In fact I think most tech related journals do, iirc.
And no one gives up with a paper, although this might have more to do with location than discipline (the academic evaluation system in my country is heavily metrics-based, having indexed papers is what makes or breaks careers). People resubmit and resubmit and resubmit, typically to venues with a progressively lower bar, until the paper is accepted.
In CS we also have competitive conference publications and, at least in my subfield, they don't have these problems to such a great extent as journals (as at least their latex templates tend to be decent, and some of them have the same length limits). One of the reasons why I prefer conference to journal publications.
That doesn't sound like the LaTeX I use. When you switch to another stylesheet, it often changes key dimensions such as page size and the number of columns. Then you have to reformat and possibly even redesign the figures, tables, equations, pseudocode, and so on. And it's quite likely that some packages you are using don't work properly with the new stylesheet, or even don't work at all, so you get some weird issues to debug.
But that's about the technical layout, which isn't the concern here, as the publisher is usually responsible for that. In biomedical fields, manuscripts are usually just Word documents with some basic formatting. The real issue is that different journals have different ideas about the length, content, and structure of the paper. When you switch to another journal, the paper itself often needs a major revision.
https://myst-tools.org/docs/mystjs/creating-pdf-documents
Then the switching of templates actually is one line. There is also hope to get a bit further in the publishers system (which ultimately needs JATS XML), because MyST can also export to JATS (which is used for pubmed etc.).
The journals I interacted with were less of a problem, as they just handed out major revisions. The only rejection I remember was with a recommendation for a more fitting journal.
While I'm not slinging manuscriots left & rught, my coauthor and I got the below linked one into Frontiers last year. The reviewers' feedback was all based on the substance. The formst we had submitted was Google Docs printed to PDF. There might have been a standard Frontiers template or font choice I started from from the outset, I can't remember but I definitely wasn't using their standard reference format in-line in the manuscript, as doing so would have made some sections and tables nigh-on unreadable for the reviewers without a lot of formatting effort.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.9099...
I hope PLOS (and whatever similar things have sprouted up) take the hint, and allow non-time-wasting submission formats.
The abstract has to have a specific number of chars or words (which varies by journal), and it's a critical part of the paper, so you never want to waste a single word. There's also limit for the total number of pages or words, which again needs text rewrites. Sometimes format of references is weird, and needs conversion macros or manual edits.
Reviewers always want more information, more references, more tables, so publishing is an endless puzzle to fit all of that within limit that is always too short to fit everything you have to say.
Having concise paper is of course great, but submitting to multiple places requires editing multiple variations, and that is busywork.
EDIT: This usually limits proper explanations of the data in the text too because of very limited word counts.
It's interesting to note the difference between papers 30 (this might vary by field) years ago compared to now. The old papers are mostly substance, and spend very little space on the introduction and political "positioning". Partly this makes sense since things were younger and work tended to be more novel by default back then.
But I also think it's a sign of a sort of petty dysfunction. Academics get graded on their "impact", and citations is part of that. So reviewers want you to cite their results, and your reviewers are likely to be folks with similar papers. So authors go citation crazy, trying to appease selfish reviewers, leaving themselves with less than three pages to describe what they actually did.
What is painful is when one venue has a length limit of 6 pages and the next has a limit of 5 pages (plus one page for references), but when you port the paper from one Latex template to the other it explodes to 8 pages because of formatting.
In all cases, what they want and what you have is "a short paper" but you're going to have to take several hours out of your life and probably make some meaningful changes to the content.
What would be best is if publishers could come together and harmonize their requirements to the extent possible.
Most of academic science as we know it today is structured so that the output is "publishable" and/or helps future grant applications. Incremental improvements are very publishable, but that doesn't necessarily make good science. Grants are awarded to scientists who are consistently able to deliver results, in the form of published papers. I can only really speak for my little corner of science, but from my view, the entire incentive structure of science is broken.
Like, the existing system already has issues with publication being too easy to game, with predatory paid journals, lax standards for reviewing, etc; that's hard to fix, but it's considered a problem - and so any changes making the barrier to publication even lower than that won't be welcome.
And from the perspective of researchers, we don't really want more publications - they're a pain to read, there's an overabundance of poor content that's salami-sliced, we do so many publications because the incentives push us toward this but we recognize that this is a bad thing and we'd be far better off if the same research would be published in fewer, better articles. But we can't, because anyone who does that will be effectively denied resources for future research.
Sometimes it's small, like whether or not `\author{my name}` needs to be included in the preamble or in the main body. These are short but annoying. Sometimes it's very annoying. I'm glad that I've never tried to publish in a two-column journal (which might exist in math? I don't know) which would require more substantial superficial edits.
I always assumed that this was a deliberate source of friction, slightly raising the bar of entry so as to discourage a certain sort of submission. I don't say I agree with this, but that's what I thought.
This sounds like the sort of problem that latex would be great at solving: changing the look of an article just by using different document classes. And sometimes it is great --- but some templates are terrible, terrible, terrible. (And sometimes these terrible templates are for great journals! I see little to no correlation there).
There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s intentional gatekeeping. There’s a reason why many papers are being “published” on Arxiv and foregoing all this boxticking.
The whole publishing process is fundamentally broken. Aaron Swartz (RIP) had the right idea all along. Get rid of the middlemen sucking up millions of dollars by paywalling government funded research.
It’s been proven time and time again that a shocking number of studies can’t be reproduced and that the traditional peer review process just isn’t working. It’s a good old boys’ club putting a stamp of approval on their friends’ work and keeping the outsiders away.
When it comes to Math though, I do have some sympathies. There are so many cranks that think they solved Collatz or a millennium problem and don’t even know what they don’t know. It must be exhausting to sift through all that noise in a volunteer, unpaid position. These shibboleths might be a necessary evil.
> Math though, I do have some sympathies. There are so many cranks
Lots of other fields have their cranks, quacks, fringe theorists, and whackjobs. Why give math special treatment?
Math is not so different from computer science in that it seems relatively approachable to a layperson. But there are relatively few mathematicians out there. That same level of spam is being filtered by much fewer people.
To me, it’s akin to why the Linux kernel devs operate the way they do. No GitHub issue page, no Slack, no Discord, banning topposting and web email providers. It’s all based on old school mailing lists, because there’s orders of magnitude more amateurs than kernel devs and they don’t have time for handholding the unwashed masses.
Anyway, I think there’s some middle ground to be found between this extremely burdensome process to submit a paper for publishing, and making it as easy to publish as making a forum post…
I couldn't quite get it to the company standard, but I got it down to under an hour worth of work for our tech writer per release.
In the end it was a week's work for me and it improved our integration tests. Not the constant draw on resources and sanity that I think someone was after.
Once (for a Springer journal) I got called out by their editorial staff, and told I had to follow their dumb rules. So I did. But I would never do this preemptively.
Publishers charge thousands of dollars for a subscription to a single journal. If they want their papers formatted in a certain way, then they can employ staff to do that work themselves. If any for-profit journal tries to insist that authors do lots of reformatting work before even submitting, I will never submit to or review for them again.
However, what remains are rules on page limit, number of words or similar restrictions. And in most cases, you try to fit as much content as possible into the template. So when changing the template, you either have more or less space, so either you would want to add more content, or you need to remove content. Even with the same number of pages and other things being similar as well, due do small differences in the template, it will not match up. That is what takes effort.
But for the aspect on space restrictions, I have heard actually the opposite argument: By having this limitation, you save the reading time of all your peers. Often, the work you did can actually be compressed into such short format. You might need to leave out some details (if you publish the source code and make it reproducible, people could anyway check for all details though, so not really a problem), but you can focus on the actual important part. So, by wasting some extra time and effort of the author, you save a lot of time and effort for all readers by having this restriction.
If your work really does not fit the space limitations, maybe a different conference or journal would anyway be the better fit.
I have the feeling that when my interest in a paper is enough to read everything, I might as well read a couple more pages if the paper is going to feel less crammed (often compression makes understanding harder). Although I might be underestimating the issue.
Last summer I was able to take 6 months off of work to build a prototype and now I'm inching it forward as a side project. It's in early beta, and I'm looking for folks willing to use it to solicit review of their pre-prints and give me feedback and direction on where it take it.
It's open source, open access, and intended to stay that way. If it gets traction I want to form a non-profit, multistakeholder cooperative (governed by its users and the team that builds it) to develop and maintain it. Though, that's a long way off.
The beta is here: https://peer-review.io
The source is here: https://github.com/danielbingham/peerreview
A more in depth description of how it works is here: https://peer-review.io/about
Also, journal publication fees dwarf the implicit cost of reformatting and deliver arguably less value.
Still a work in progress, since tiny context limit makes this so hard (I keep trying to get Claude access, including joining a Claude hackathon, but for some reason I never get access), but I'll be more than happy to share this thing for free so we can all go back to working on the science.
As my PI says: "Science is not an exercise in creative writing"
Science is not an exercise in creative writing, so write straightforwardly.
In all seriousness, I think that writing ideas down, condensing them, reading the result aloud and re-editing vigorously is where the real thinking takes place. That iterative process is thinking, for anything complex. It cannot be done by a computer. If you are completely confident in your ideas before you have written them down in concrete form, they are probably not novel enough to be worth publishing.
In the end, your thinking is a process, not the outcome. It is a tool to prove an outcome based on data and logic; better thinking and better writing makes the argument easier to understand, but should lead to exactly the same outcome for the reader, just with a bit less effort compared to sloppy thinking and sloppy writing.
Major difference in paper _style_ between Nature Brief Communication (2 figures, one page of text) and J Neuroscience full (10 pages and 8 figures). That's a big reformating. Also, Nature has a very specific abstract, which is great for a general science audience (https://www.nature.com/documents/nature-summary-paragraph.pd) but less so for specialists. Similarly, a clinical trial abstract has exact results so that it's easy to scrape. For the y-combinator audience, it seems obvious to me that a MobiCom and a ACM transactions will be very different papers.
Fixing the format doesn't fix this.
If you wrote a novella, and wanted to submit it to a magazine that published short stories, I don't think it would be reasonable to complain that they didn't want to publish your work unless it was edited down to meet their guidelines. Why is it different for scientific papers?
It just seems natural to me that different publications would have different audiences and different goals with what they are publishing. They're read by different people for different reasons who want different things from the publication they're paying for. Naturally that means that if you want them to publish your work, it has to be right for their readers.
Is there something I'm missing?
But if they're meant to be consumed by an actual audience, it makes sense to make that part easier.
If one author spending 10 hours reduces the amount 10,000 people need to read the paper by 10 minutes, that's a savings overall that is worth it.
Honestly, I’d wager most papers are read by a handful of people at best. Only the /most/ (top 1% or less) popular authors and papers get hundreds or thousands of real reads.
What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that, then you ship it. Last one I wrote in a browser through overleaf, spent zero time on formatting.
edit: Nature's one appears to be https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/springer-nature-lat...
Millions of dollars in time wasted on learning other markup language
Then you don't have much experience writing papers.
Formatting is very time consuming. Some want 8 pages, some are unlimited, others want you to use whatever makes sense.
Every journal has a different page length. They expect to see results in different places. Some want a detailed appendix. Others are ok with a website.
The latex template doesn't help at all with any of these.
Reformatting is extremely painful and wasteful.
That said, recognising static academic reference format, then reformatting for the other 4 or 5 standard formats seems like a python project for first year students (to this non-programmer, I'd guess there are lots of edge cases to trip on making it a great learning experience!)?
An additional annoyance is that to save space, journals often want formats that are compact but inefficient to use, for example, formats that are heavily abbreviated and don't include titles. These, however, are annoying to use, and annoying reviewers is generally unwise. So in our case, we actually intentionally submit PDFs for review that use the 'wrong' bibliography item format, of a similar form to the journal's but less abbreviated and including titles and hyperlink backreferences to citations in the text. Then for final submission we have to replace this with the journal's preferred format.
Publishers like Dagstuhl Publishing that can require LaTeX submissions and use a completely LaTeX publishing workflow probably have significant efficiency advantages, but then rely on potential authors being sufficiently experienced with LaTeX that a LaTeX submission requirement doesn't drive people away. This can work well for computer science and some parts of physics, but for other fields it can be a significant burden.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/final-submission
#2 seems less likely, since, well, there isn't really a common format, as the article points out, so there's no default that researchers would use as a baseline.
That leaves #1. But a paper has to be formatted somehow, and that's always going to take time. So the $230M cost the article cites is going to be at least a little smaller when you take out the time it takes to write up anything at all using a consistent style and format, whether it's your own or something imposed on you.
And I can tell you based on my own profession & day to day work, format & presentation is extremely important in making it easier for your audience to consume information, and this is especially true with complex or novel information.
Undoubtedly the industry can and should do better. There should be common standards. It would smooth readability and comprehension. But it's not going to completely eliminate the rough $/hour equivalent this article is citing.
Also consider that different fields will be conveying different types of information, or have audiences with different skillsets, so there's not a one-size-fits-all approach here. Style & formatting guidelines, even made as common as possible, will still by necessity be different in different disciplines.
Researchers work a lot on their own time, so the millions mentionned in the article don't directly impact the institutions employing them. They are alone in this fight.
The petition (https://www.change.org/p/simplify-manuscript-submissions-in-...) linked in the article barely received 100 signatures in a month.
Before it can be used for scientific papers, KeenWrite (by way of a flexmark-java extension) needs cross-references, which, unfortunately, aren't part of the CommonMark specification.
I posit that the vast majority of LaTeX users don't grok how to separate content from presentation. When I asked a question on TeX.SE[4] about how to adjust the line spacing between enumerated items (spanning a couple dozen enumerated lists), the vast majority of people voted for the answer of using `\itemsep0em` to tweak each list individually. The correct answer, IMO, is to fix the problem globally, and not waste time tweaking individual lists.
[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30
[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite
[4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/reduce-space-be...
Having semantic authoring tools also means that you can easily change the template -- saving a ton of time for the author. For example, about 400 journal templates here: https://myst-tools.org/docs/mystjs/creating-pdf-documents
Yeah right.
This is YC though.
Up-for-grabs: Untapped $260m market for reformatting scientific papers.
Yes but what about all this unnecessary gatekeeping? gatekeeping is necessary to maintain a certain level of quality. On this specific issue of formatting gatekeeping. There was no conspiracy. I imagine that the policy solidified over time. The paper wants to maintain a specific look. Authors are upset when changes get introduced while formatting. The paper then says "you can format it yourself if it meets our specification". Now you have to format it yourself.
Thankfully in our web enabled era there a ways to publish without going through a traditional publisher. However you will note that the quality of these publishers is a mixed bag, real science right next to quackery. No one has done the gatekeeping needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Which does the paper want more? To be the first with the results or to appear a particular way? Do the appearances help with "the results?"
How much does having a consistent "look" lend itself to the perceived professionalism and respect a journal has?
Scattered additional thoughts on desirability of publishing platforms.
* Self publish(and hope you are famous enough to get noticed)
* Publishing company that does little to no checking of papers.
* open web based publishing.
* corporate researcher, all published results stay in corporate library.Do you remember which subscripts must be italicized?
They will be solved by people communicating with each other to reach a consensus, or not at all.