Miraba's Journal: My TL;DR on scientific publishing

If anyone wants to know what happens when a paper is at a scientific publisher, here's my write-up of the editing process at AGU:

My teal deer, let me show you it.

Big difference

[Trillan]

Thanks for the info. That's quite a bit more than I expected.

Re:

[Miraba]

It's a massive amount of work. What the parent doesn't realize is that most papers are not suitable for publishing when they're accepted.

Yesterday I had a paper where the authors used the wrong (and in fact non-existent) species name half the time. Today I had a paper where the author didn't seem to understand the concept of how to format tables in LaTeX.

Re:

[Trillan]

Do I understand correctly that you (that is, the publication, not necessarily you specifically) hire the copy editor?

Re:

[Miraba]

AGU has something like a dozen full-time CEs, plus a handful of assistant CEs. We have the occasional freelancer (frequently someone who once worked at AGU) and we do some outsourcing to our normal vendor, but we prefer to do everything in-house to ensure a consistent product. Finding a CE who knows the Chicago style is easy; teaching people our specifics takes a bit more time and effort.

Re:

[Trillan]

Yeah, with enough business (and it sounds like you guys have it), hiring fulltime people would be the only way to go. Still, I can see how something most of us don't even think of would increase the cost quite a bit.

Ever wish just once you could let the world see the original text? :)