To clarify--I applaud the trend of letting authors provide final copy
electronically. My gripe was only with having to submit papers for review
electronically, and only because 1)I may not use their preferred software,
and thus its a pain to go to all that trouble for a paper they may reject
and, 2)I know they plan to electronically forward the paper to some poor
soul who is going to have to pay for printing the paper just to do the
favor of reviewing it.
My last book, and last paper, were both edited electronically. That was
great. Though, I am sure the discerning will find a typo here or there.
Anything that puts more work (i.e., powers) into authors' hands is good.
Anything that puts more work (i.e., chores) into reviewers' hands is bad.
Take care.
Sam
On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Kit Baum wrote:
> Many publishers (including many European publishers: e.g. Elsevier /
> North Holland, Springer / Kluwer) provide authors with a set of LaTeX
> macros that will make the submission look exactly like it should if
> accepted and published in that journal. Indeed, our own Stata Journal
> does the same, providing a set of LaTeX macros that makes it possible
> for the author to produce a camera-ready article. Some would carp
> that this implies the publisher is pushing the work back on the
> author, but in reality it makes it more likely that the typesetting
> errors that creep in from de novo typing of an entire manuscript are
> prevented.
>
> My review of the last submission I received as an associate editor of
> the Stata Journal was delayed by two weeks by the authors' providing
> a MS Word document with embedded equations that turned into gibberish
> in my perfectly fine copy of MS Word. If and when accepted, the paper
> will have to be retyped in LaTeX, the Stata Journal's standard.
>
> Clive Nicholas is correct in noting that most social science journals
> accept MS Word and, possibly, LaTeX. In contrast, it is my
> understanding that most mathematical journals will not accept
> submissions in anything but LaTeX (or its variant amsTeX). And as
> Nick Cox points out, there are excellent implementations of LaTeX for
> all OSs. My coauthor uses Windows, and his MikTeX (http://miktex.org)
> and WinEDT (http:winedt.com) environment creates PDFs with one click
> (as does my TeXShop in Mac OS X). The fact that we both use LaTeX
> makes it much easier to exchange documents, Stata LaTeX-formatted
> output (thanks to Ben Jann's estout) and graphics to be included in
> our research papers.
>
> Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
> http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
>
>
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