“Saving Time and Money in Biomedical Publishing: the Case for Free-Format Submissions With Minimal Requirements”, 2023-05-10 (; backlinks):
Background: Manuscript preparation and the (re)submission of articles can create a large workload in academic jobs. In this exploratory analysis, we estimate the time and costs needed to meet the diverse formatting requirements for manuscript submissions in biomedical publishing.
Method: We reviewed 302 leading biomedical journals’ submission guidelines and extracted information on the components that tend to vary the most among submission guidelines (the length of the title, the running title, the abstract, and the manuscript; the structure of the abstract and the manuscript, number of items and references allowed, whether the journal has a template). We estimated annual research funding lost due to manuscript formatting by calculating hourly academic salaries, the time lost to reformatting articles, and quantifying the total number of resubmissions per year. We interviewed several researchers and senior journal editors and editors-in-chief to contextualize our findings and develop guidelines that could help both biomedical journals and researchers work more efficiently.
Results: Among the analyzed journals, we found a huge diversity in submission requirements. By calculating average researcher salaries in the European Union and the USA, and the time spent on reformatting articles, we estimated that $230m USD were lost in 2021 alone due to reformatting articles.
Should the current practice remain unchanged within this decade, we estimate ~$2.5b USD could be lost 2022–82030—solely due to reformatting articles after a first editorial desk rejection.
In our interviews, we found alignment between researchers and editors; researchers would like the submission process to be as straightforward and simple as possible, and editors want to easily identify strong, suitable articles and not waste researchers’ time.
Conclusions: Based on the findings from our quantitative analysis and contextualized by the qualitative interviews, we conclude that free-format submission guidelines would benefit both researchers and editors. However, a minimum set of requirements is necessary to avoid manuscript submissions that lack structure. We developed our guidelines to improve the status quo, and we urge the publishers and the editorial-advisory boards of biomedical journals to adopt them. This may also require support from publishers and major international organizations that govern the work of editors.
[Academic publishers externalize the cost of reformatting onto researchers, for hardly any gain to themselves, because they can and it slightly increases their (already gigantic) profit margins. This epitomizes 1992’s thesis on the near-zero productivity growth of white-collar workers in the productivity paradox: any gains to researcher efficiency can be simply eaten up by lazy apathetic negative-sum choices by publishers, which enjoy quasi-monopolies and can more easily externalize their costs when the costs are imposed in a form do not have legible dollar amounts, but instead simply subtly destroy the most valuable time/labor (ie. making world-class researchers screw around with LaTeX formatting when an ordinary person could do it).]