the hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in time wasted making papers match journal pointers
Journals have broadly differing manuscript-formatting necessities, drastically inconveniencing researchers.Credit score: Tatomm/Getty
For scientists submitting their papers to journals, there’s an all-too-familiar drill: spend hours formatting the paper to fulfill the journal’s pointers; if the paper is rejected, sink extra time into reformatting it for one more journal; repeat.
Now an evaluation has put a price ticket on all that busy work: US$230 million value of time was wasted by scientists worldwide reformatting papers despatched to biomedical journals in 2021 alone1. Appalled by that exorbitant value, the authors of the evaluation, which was revealed in BMC Medication on 10 Might, suggest that journals ought to permit free-format submissions so researchers can spend their money and time on analysis as a substitute.
“I can’t think about why anybody would care what an article appears like the primary time a journal sees it,” says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State College in Tempe, who was not concerned with the research. “I don’t suppose it’s a productive use of my time.”
Choosy, choosy
It’s primarily the inconsistencies between journals’ pointers that pressure researchers to reformat and typically rewrite their manuscripts, says Laura Hilton, a most cancers genomicist at BC Most cancers, a care centre in Vancouver, Canada. For instance, some journals require graphical abstracts whereas others don’t; some mix the outcomes and dialogue sections however others preserve them separate. Journals set wildly differing limits on the variety of characters in a paper’s title, the summary’s phrase rely, the size of the reference record and extra.
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Not all journals reject submissions that don’t conform to their specs, however there’s an implicit strain to observe them, says Tibor Varga, an epidemiologist on the College of Copenhagen and a co-author of the evaluation. Researchers who spoke to Nature say that they don’t thoughts formatting their articles to adapt to a journal’s fashion, so long as they’re doing that work after their research has been accepted.
This time burden disproportionately impacts early-career researchers, says Michelle Starr, a paediatric nephrologist on the Indiana College Faculty of Medication in Indianapolis. “When persons are extra established, they may have a complete workforce who might help with this piece.” Out of 5 of Starr’s manuscripts that journals are contemplating, 4 of them got here again to her inside days so she might right formatting errors the journal employees had discovered.
To get an concept of the price of reformatting, Varga and his colleagues estimated average hourly academic salaries in america and the European Union, the time spent reformatting per manuscript (4 hours) and the annual variety of resubmissions. They calculated that, if present journal practices don’t change, reformatting might value about $2.5 billion in researchers’ time between 2022 and 2030. Many journals have transitioned to publishing analysis on-line solely, that means that many of those formatting pointers are “historic artefacts” of print layouts, Varga says.
Golden-middle proposal
Different researchers have proposed that every one journals ought to have the identical set of pointers or permit fully free-format submissions. However on the idea of a evaluation of greater than 300 journals’ pointers and interviews with scientists and journal editors, the authors advocate a “golden-middle” resolution that may permit researchers to submit manuscripts with out following particular formatting calls for, however as a substitute abiding by minimal structural necessities comparable to complete phrase rely.
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Varga and his colleagues are planning to launch an “aggressive” outreach marketing campaign to journals, publishers, universities, funders and organizations such because the Worldwide Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to implement their suggestions. They’ve already launched an online petition that greater than 100 individuals have signed.
Co-author Amy Clotworthy, an ethnologist on the College of Copenhagen, says that the authors centered primarily on biomedical journals as a result of these are inclined to have a selected format that’s completely different from, for instance, that of social-sciences publications. However she says that the authors’ suggestions for free-format submissions apply to different disciplines as nicely.
Unsustainable system
Christine Laine, editor-in-chief of the journal Annals of Inside Medication based mostly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is the secretariat for the ICMJE, says that, on condition that there are literally thousands of journals with completely different “audiences and ‘personalities’”, it’s “usually applicable” for journals to have completely different necessities for phrase rely and different features of a paper. She provides that editors at Annals evaluation submitted manuscripts that don’t adhere to its formatting guidance.
Nature affords a prolonged list of formatting guidelines for manuscripts. However Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, based mostly in London, says that the preliminary format of a submission to the journal “doesn’t affect consideration of the manuscript” and that the journal will “fastidiously contemplate” the solutions put ahead by the evaluation. (Nature’s information workforce is editorially unbiased of its journals workforce.)
Varga acknowledges that some journals have change into extra lenient about manuscript formatting at submission. However there’s a rising sentiment that researchers is not going to put up with practices that “drastically inconvenience them”, he says. “The present system shouldn’t be sustainable.”