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. ”https://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/WatesandCampbellpublishedversion.pdf">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.