TITLE: Thoughts on the publication process
DATE: 2020-05-05
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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I've recently published my first, first-author paper in a 
peer-reviewed journal. It was a fairly bland paper, comparing the 
tree diversity and woodland structure of some woodlands in Bicuar 
National Park, Angola, with other woodland sites around the miombo 
ecoregion. The paper was part of an invited special issue on 
African biodiversity. While I've been a co-author on papers before, 
this is the first time I have been the one responding to emails and 
actually going through the process of submitting the paper. There 
were a few things in the publication process that I found were 
different to how I expected them to be. I don't know how unique my 
experience was to the journal I was publishing with, or maybe even 
coloured a bit by Coronavirus stuff and people adjusting to working 
remotely, but some things irked me a bit.

I was surprised at the reviewer comments I received. I was hoping 
for more of a constructive discussion around the content of the 
paper, the actual scientific merit of the analysis, but instead I 
mostly got back comments like "you should add a table to display 
those ANOVA results" and "I don't think you should use the word 
'permanent' to describe these plots, because they are only two 
years old. Tedious stuff. Maybe I shouldn't have expected so much, 
I guess this paper isn't dealing with anything particularly 
controversial as far as the analysis and discussion is concerned. I 
think it would have just satisfied me a bit more knowing that my 
peers had read the manuscript in depth and properly thought about 
its implications.

The second thing is I was surprised at how hands-off the editorial 
team were. I feel like part of the editors job should be to 
properly assess whether the reviewers comments are informative and 
"true", and also to check whether the author's responses adequately 
address those issues. It seemed at times like the editors just 
skimmed through the changes, if they checked them at all. Finally, 
I think given the exorbitant price of publishing, the editors 
really need to provide a greater proofing service, this seems like 
it should be one of the main roles of a copy editor. Asking the 
authors to adhere to the journal's style on tiny things like the 
italicization of table headings seems like the wrong way round to 
me. Sure, if the author's formatting style makes the manuscript 
less easy to follow, but if the only change is one formatting 
consistency for another formatting consistency, I think that should 
be the prerogative of the journal editors.