RE: Maximising research access vs. minimizing copy-editing errors:WARNING LONG

["Lisa Dittrich" <lrdittrich@aamc.org>]

Let me try to answer this.  I'll say first that I work at an 
education journal, so I cannot address the issue of people dying 
or not because of errors in mss., although I've heard stories 
here and there (not about people dying, but about inadvertant 
slips in dosage info, etc.).  But, again, here's my experience.

First, let me say that when journal editors (with a big "E") talk 
about "value added" they mean much more than 
copyediting/substantive editing. They are talking about what it 
takes to run a peer-review system (and it DOES take work and 
money, beyond the volunteer efforts of peer-reviewers, which we 
certainly very much appreciate); the costs of maintaining a Web 
site and keeping up w/the attendent changes in technology; 
promoting the journal (and thereby the work of authors), etc. 
It's also the imprimatur (sp?) of the journal that is an added 
value.  This is why authors can't seem to live w/us or w/out us. 
Because if we don't add anything, why not just post articles to a 
web site and be done w/it?  Now, everyone can argue what the 
financial value of this is--i.e., how much should be paid for 
this and who should pay it, but there is value added.

But onto manuscript editing.  It sounds like you are a good 
writer.  And many of our authors are.  For them, what we do is 
icing on the cake, as well as what we need to do to format text 
to meet our style requirements.  If all of our authors were not 
only excellent w/their content but also excellent at writing 
about their areas of expertise, then you would be pretty much 
correct--we'd be left to do pretty useless copyediting and 
formatting.

But many other of our authors do NOT do a good job of conveying 
their ideas, in part because they understand them so well 
themselves.  They mix up terms, don't define well what they mean, 
write in a disorganized way, or leave out things because they 
know it so why don't we? Sometimes reviewers pick this up--but 
sometimes they don't, because they, too are experts in the same 
field, and often can fill in the dots, or are reading so fast 
they get the major points but don't realize some "connective 
tissue" is missing.  I recently helped a junior copyeditor with a 
paper in which an author introduced a term halfway through the 
ms. and it was completely unclear whether or not he was using a 
different name for something discussed earlier, or whether this 
was a new concept, or....And the whole ms. was full of things 
like this.  The program he was describing was interesting and 
worth getting into the literature, but trying to sort out what he 
meant was a bit dizzying. Only a good substantive editor working 
closely with an author can tackle situations like that.

Also, more and more journal editors are dealing with ESL or 
international authors.  Of course, some of these authors have a 
better command of English than native speakers, but many really 
need extra editing help.  It's a tough call deciding how far to 
go, but a couple of years ago we had a paper from Argentina on a 
really important topic--and it was almost unintelligable.  I 
personally worked with the author to rewrite it virtually word by 
word.  Would I do that again?  I don't know.  But it was an 
important paper and certainly important to his career, and I was 
happy to help him get his message out.

So, as usual, the answer isn't cut and dried.  And our journal is 
admittedly one of the few that still does real substantive 
editing.  I would note that authors never think their work needs 
help--until we find their mistakes (as we did yesterday, in a 
theme issue where all the authors mixed up a common term--and 
we're talking bigwig authors) and they thank us.

Lisa