Aneth David
I have just completed submitting two manuscripts on two different journals under two different publishers. You know what that means, two VERY different submission systems, requirements and interfaces. I have spent about 4.5 hours on the submission process alone. And I still feel like I got something wrong, which will lead to manuscripts to be returned, and the process will have to be repeated. One journal specified that figures and legends should be on separate pages, what does that even mean? And why?
I am always frustrated when it comes to manuscript submission. This leads to me putting it off as long as I can. I would find an hour here and an hour there and start the process but the way it is complicated when I resume its like starting from scratch. So my only hope is to find a 2+ hours stretch to just do it in one go. And this works for systems which I ma familiar with, for new systems it usually takes longer and I run the risk of missing something.
Here are my main frustrations with the manuscript submission process and honestly the entire publishing process:
1. Multiple submission systems with different requirements each. So, for non academics out there, there are thousands of journals which are owned by a smaller number of publishers and all of these publishers have their own online submission systems, which are almost never intuitive or user-friendly. You have to be a wizard essentially to guess where buttons for doing what are. For a first time author using these systems, it's a nightmare.
2. Formatting requirements, some abstract and unnecessary. These publishers also have different formatting formats, from number of words in the title, abstract and whole manuscript, to reference styles, spacing rules, and don't forget how one writes measurement and number of figures allowed. You still have to think and fill info about data sharing, copyright issues, author contributions, whether abbreviations are a must or not. Some journals want figures submitted separately with their legends others allow figures to be part of the manuscript. Sometimes even journals in the same publisher have different requirements **sob in academia**
Why cant journals just review manuscripts' contents FIRST and if they fit allow authors to fix the references in their specific, nameless journal format later? How does spacing influence quality of a manuscript, or parentheses instead of square brackets? If one misses even the most insignificant and the smallest of these requirements, the manuscript maybe returned for fixing which wastes precious time. It already takes too long to publish papers anyway.
If the manuscript is rejected, which happens quite often, you then have to reformat the entire thing to fit a new journal. Seriously, how do we accept this?
Bottom line, this process is unnecessarily complicated and takes too long, after spending eternity attracting the funds used to conduct research, doing the actual research and collect data, analysing the data sometimes across teams of many people and WRITING the manuscript. Did I mention how dealing with co-authors can be an entirely and separate headache on itself?
This is why I like preprints by the way - formats are not an issue, submission is fast, publishing is quick and anyone can read them and comment. Its just most institutions don't recognise them as valid proof of productivity that can be counted during evaluation for things like promotion, grants application and even as a graduate school requirement.
After all this work (on top of that we pay to have papers open to anyone), can't we at least have a standardised system for manuscript submission?
Signed,
Angry corresponding author.
