Value of copy editing
In a post entitled Copy-Editing and Citation-Linking , Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network compares the version of an article finalised by the author, and the version edited by the journal. An extract is provided here:
"Two recent articles in Learned Publishing, the journal published by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), have highlighted the issue. The first, by Wates and Campbell, looked at the changes made in copy-editing in articles published in a series of Blackwell journals. The second, by Goodman, Dowson and Yaremchuk, is in the current issue of Learned Publishing, but also, interestingly, through the University of Arizona’s repository. I have not tried to compare the two versions. It would be interesting to do so, not least because they found that as a result of publishers’ copy-editing “there were a number of differences between author-final and published versions that were ‘confusing’ and that sometimes the publisher version and sometimes the author version was the more confusing”.......
In an editorial ....Sally Morris also comments on the two articles, and lays considerable stress on the value that the publisher adds in the checking and formatting of references and the provision of citation linking via CrossRef..... the need to add DOI links is a relatively new one which I gather relatively few authors actually do themselves (and I was not guided so to do by the publishers of either of my recent articles)."
See here for the full article.
We would be interested to hear further feedback from authors about the editing and web services they received from Nature journals and NPG journals, to add to the regular "author experience" surveys we conduct.
Comments
There have been other blog posts on this issue, notably from Alma Swan, of Key Perspectives, and from Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC.
One of the interesting things that Alma talks about is a project called VALREC which is seeking to develop the technology to measure differences and generate a digital certificate for different versions of article, detailing the differences between them. As she puts it, “Not only will there then be a means to itemise the exact differences between the author-final and published version, but between other, earlier, versions of an article too, perhaps those first exposed on blogs or wikis. This will permit better formalisation and monitoring of the scholarly record, especially as authors move to early-use of repositories and informal web tools as part of the communications process”.
And as to references and citations, Lorcan talks of the potential that may arise from the introduction of citation microformats or “support in something like Microsoft Word to allow structured data of this sort to be imported or exported. I still believe that we will see greater use made of a new 'bibliographic tissue' which connects the user environment and database resources through resources like citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking, microformats and RSS feeds”. As he says, it would be interesting to know whether the tools introduced in recent years to help with the capture and management of citation data have already reduced the number of errors spotted in a paper's references.
Dr Michael Jubb
Director
Research Information Network
Michael.Jubb@rin.ac.uk
Posted by: Michael Jubb | August 7, 2007 01:51 PM