What happens to your manuscript in production?

There’s a lot of talk about what publishers add to your paper. The community writes the paper, edits the paper and peer reviews the paper, so why does it cost to publish in an open access journal? Some costs come from hosting, some from the publishing staff required to traffic papers, but the main direct costs come from the production of your article.

This is because XML needs to be generated for most journals (more about XML in this post). Generating a correctly structured XML file from the original manuscript source file (usually MS Word) has proved extremely difficult to automate and is still a largely manual process involving at least one QC (quality control) step. People cost money, so here is where most of the cost comes in.

Once in XML, conversion to PDF and HTML for online publication can be automated (although many publishers still compose the PDF more or less manually). This requires complex technology and setup and so the cost is still non negligible, especially if you include maintenance and further manual QC. Manual tweaking is also required when automation just can’t handle difficult layout scenarios (think of a paper with many equations, figures, headings and bullet points for example), so that’s more staff involved in the production of a manuscript.

And then there’s the proof correction cycles. Authors mark up their proof PDF and production staff have to implement those corrections, generate new proofs and check them. Even publishers who have systems where authors implement corrections themselves need to maintain those system and do some QC.

Finally, the paper is ready and must be published. Production staff package the PDF, XML, HTML, figures and other files and send them to be published. Again, someone checks that the PDF and HTML are fine one last time before pressing the “publish” button.

Cost at all of these stages add up and this is why the cost to publish seems higher than might be expected.

That said, developments are ongoing to truly automate the process of generating an XML file from an MS Word manuscript, which should reduce costs further. Authoring tools such as Overleaf and Authorea bypass the need for Word to XML conversion altogether: papers written on such platforms are directly saved in a structured, marked-up format behind the scenes, allowing automated conversion to XML. However, at the moment, most authors submit in Word and, despite guidelines, no two submissions will ever be styled or formatted the same, requiring human intelligence to process them (for now at least)!

Costs could also be saved by publishing in PDFs alone, where the author’s proof is converted with minimal extra typesetting. There are companies that offer this for about $10 per article, but although PDFs are great for printing, without XML/HTML it’s not so easy to share content and metadata. PDFs also won’t reflow on tablet and phone screens and things like text mining, indexing, and organisation of content on your website are also much harder without XML/HTML. Such requirement are getting more and more important for discovery, sharing and reading and are currently only available through a publisher with an XML/HTML workflow.

At Veruscript we operate an XML workflow, but we have stripped down our costs to the absolute minimum to charge just £300 per article published. We believe this is a fair cost for a full service and much, much lower than most publishers. We offer advice from our team regarding your journal and use actual humans to check the output of the XML and that it has been converted properly. We want your journal to succeed and believe this is the best way to help you.

Find out more about our publishing services.

Thanks to Joris Roulleau for his input into this article.