Copy‐editing — essential or frill?

In the ongoing debate about open access (OA), there are conflicting assumptions about costs, and there have been many debates on email discussion lists about ‘the true costs of the essentials’. Some of the advocates of OA say that the only essential function of a journal is peer review. Since the actual refereeing is done voluntarily by subject experts, they argue that the only real cost elements of an e-only journal are thus the administration of an articlehandling and peer-review system, and maintaining a database of the accepted articles on a server with a search facility. Publishers, on the other hand, say that they provide many value-added features that incur costs, and therefore the journal’s income streams need to be sufficient to cover all these costs as well as those of refereeing. One of these value-added features is copy-editing. This was controversial long before electronic publishing had been heard of. When I first entered the scholarly publishing industry over forty years ago, there was a conflict even within the small editorial office in which I worked. One of the editorial assistants – the one who trained me in the craft – favoured thorough copy-editing. Another favoured a light touch, and consequently got through more manuscripts in each working day. Some of our authors complained about ‘nit-picking’ changes to their text, and there was no consensus among them about the desirability of house style – something which most publishers, scholarly or otherwise, felt was important. In reality, more than half of the errors that the full-time editorial staff detected and corrected were in the references. The detailed checking of references was indeed a nit-picking job, but it was something that both authors and referees were notably bad at. In those days, before word-processors, there were of course no spell-checkers, grammar-checkers or referencemanagement software, and all these types of error had to be checked for by human eyes. We also conducted less mechanical kinds of check – we looked for internal contradictions in the text, for tables and figures that had been misnumbered so that they did not match their captions, for columns of numbers that did not add up to the total given, and for confusion between family and given names of non-European authors. For papers by authors who were not native speakers of English, we attempted to rewrite the text into good English without changing the intended sense, often quite a delicate task if one was not to offend the author. Given that we were graduates in the discipline of our journals, we were also able to some extent to spot minor scientific errors that the referees and journal editors had missed in their broad-brush checks. We also ‘marked up for press’ – that is to say, indicated to the typesetter what typographical conventions should be applied to each part of the text. It is certainly true that electronic prepress and electronic publishing have removed the need for many of these checks. Virtually all documents are now supplied by authors to publishers in machine-readable form; referees and journal editors do their work on the electronic text; and the administration of articles consists largely of version control. Spell-checkers and grammar-checkers exist, and reference management software enables staff to alter the format of references into their journal’s preferred style automatically. Figures and tables have probably been computer-generated, often directly from the output of laboratory machines, eliminating the possibility of transcription or arithmetic errors. The final version of the text goes directly into typesetting software, eliminating the need to ‘mark up for press’, and avoiding rekeying errors by typesetters. So do the OA advocates have a point? Is copy-editing unnecessary today, and is publishers’ belief in it an indication of outdated attitudes leading to expensive makework? If a copy-editor did nothing more than mechanical work, then yes, computers have rendered this kind of work redundant, like so many other routine tasks that were done by clerical staff in the past. But as I have noted, good copy-editors, especially those with subject knowledge of the fields of their journals, do a lot more than mechanical work. Referees are very busy people – if they are university lecturers, almost certainly a lot busier today than their preCopy-editing – essential or frill? 71