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Fairly high on my list of "I want those hours of my life back" is time spent wrangling my LaTeX to compile correctly with the style files provided by journal publishers, and subsequently dealing with copyeditors who introduce errors while making my papers conform to "house style".

Back when the primary medium of a journal was a print publication, I suppose maybe it made some sense for all the papers in one journal to look the same. But nowadays I acquire nearly all papers electronically, and I assume the same is true for many people. Is there any good reason for journals to continue to insist on a house style?

To be clear, I certainly understand that some minimal requirements are necessary. For instance, a journal that has a print version will certainly want consistency in font, font size and margins, to ensure a fair comparison of the lengths of different papers. And I recognize that copyeditors serve a useful function in general. But I don't see why a journal needs to require that I use their custom .cls file that is (for instance) incompatible with standard packages like amsthm, numbers equations as (1) (2) (3) rather than the more useful (1.3) (3.2) (5.3), or requires enumerated lists to be labeled 1.2.3 instead of (i)(ii)(iii).

I recognize that this sounds like a rant. But I really intend it as an honest question. I can think of at least three possible kinds of answer:

  1. There is a good reason that I'm unaware of.
  2. There is a bad reason that I'm unaware of (e.g. somehow it makes the publishers more money).
  3. It's just inertia, leftover from older days of print journals.

I would really like to know which of those is the case, and if (1) or (2) then what the reason is.

Fomite
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Mike Shulman
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    I would be scared to leave the style up to the authors. – Austin Henley Jul 13 '17 at 15:35
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    The same reasons uniforms and standards are used. – 101010111100 Jul 13 '17 at 16:16
  • I like journals having different styles because if I'm looking at a paper on arXiv the style quickly tells me what journal it's been submitted to/ published in. – astronat supports the strike Jul 13 '17 at 17:56
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    Two comments: (1) Are you sure that wrangling with the LaTeX is necessary? Publishers "encourage" it on their website, but (in math anyway) usually you can decline and then their employees will do it. Considering that they charge money for their journals, I believe that it is perfectly ethical to leave this work to them. – Anonymous Jul 13 '17 at 18:29
  • (2) Here is a question I asked when a copyeditor made a complete mess of my paper. I refused to go through and enumerate all the mistakes they introduced; instead, I sent them an angry e-mail and demanded that they start over. Many copyeditors do an excellent job. But if a copyeditor treats your work carelessly, then I recommend the same response. – Anonymous Jul 13 '17 at 18:32
  • Do you want papers in Comic Sans? Because this is how you get papers in Comic Sans. – Fomite Jul 13 '17 at 19:38
  • @astronat In my experence most papers on arxiv are pre-wrangling into the journal style, and why would I care anyway? – Mike Shulman Jul 13 '17 at 21:17
  • @Fomite feel free to add "font" to "font size and margins" in my third paragraph. – Mike Shulman Jul 13 '17 at 21:18
  • @Mike as someone who has yet to publish it's useful for me to get an idea of what type of paper is published by which journal. – astronat supports the strike Jul 13 '17 at 21:27
  • @astronat you have yet to publish yourself and yet you're already familiar enough with the style of different journals that you can tell them apart at a glance? I've published plenty of my own papers and I have yet to develop that ability. – Mike Shulman Jul 13 '17 at 21:30
  • @Mike the 3 main journals in my field all use different fonts and citation styles... so yeah, at a glance. It's like brand recognition, I guess. – astronat supports the strike Jul 13 '17 at 21:32
  • @Anonymous that's a good point. But even free journals that charge no money, and presumably have no budget or employees to do the work themselves, generally ask authors to use their supplied style. – Mike Shulman Jul 13 '17 at 21:40
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    I suspect that one reason is that it makes it look like the publisher is contributing something beyond web hosting. – Thomas Jul 13 '17 at 21:42
  • @Anonymous Also, given the hash that copyeditors often make of my already-wrangled files, I would be scared to leave any more than necessary to them. – Mike Shulman Jul 13 '17 at 22:05
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    I find this question surprising. I don't think I have had to actually have anything to do with the journals style so far in publishing papers. They ask for a .pdf for review and then for the .tex file when it is time to publish. Then they have a copyeditor apply their style using the .tex file and then you point out those places where the copyeditor introduced mistakes (also, my experience with copyeditors has not been nearly as bad as yours, mainly having to point out places where the math break lines). – Tobias Kildetoft Jul 14 '17 at 07:34
  • @TobiasKildetoft In my experience, practically all journals' websites say "prepare your latex using our style file". – Mike Shulman Jul 19 '17 at 14:01

1 Answers1

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There are several reasons:

  1. Publishers want their papers distinguishable. Everyone1 knows Elsevier by the logo and font.

  2. Consistency itself is a good goal, to an extent.

  3. It means you easier meet certain quality standards. (If I could, I would show you things people submitted as final versions for publication.)

  4. I'm afraid that if you let people do what they wish, it would be seriously disasterous. (I speak from a Copy Editor/Typesetter experience.)

  5. I would not call it inertia, from my point of view, journals are typography and typography is art, and art should be done artfully, no matter we live in a crazy fast-cooked world.

Last but not least, note that AMS does not require you to comply with everything, I published a paper where some enumerations are numeral and some are alphabetic.

1Almost.

yo'
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    Well, I'm not one of your "everyone". I generally barely even notice what journal a paper is published in. And I don't see an intrinsic value in consistency, especially when the consistency is only across a bunch of papers with nothing in common except that they happened to get published in the same journal. Can you explain in what way requirements like "enumerated lists must be 1.2.3." make it easier to meet quality standards or avoid disasterous results? – Mike Shulman Jul 13 '17 at 21:16
  • For "not being everyone", well, you are not, many are. Like with any brand, many people recognize it by the logo and style, many people do not. For consistency, well, that's up to you, but it is somehow related to the quality standards. Why it is good that there is a prescription how e.g. lists or headers look like? Well, if one list is enumerated 1,2,3 and another one is enumerated a,b,c in the same paper, it would (at least in me) raise question about the significance of this: Are lists enumerated this or that way somewhat special in the article? Have I missed something? – yo' Jul 14 '17 at 18:18
  • Or imagine one section having a bold title and another one on the same level having an italic one. Again, does it mean that even though they are numbered 3. and 4., it's somewhat that 4 is actually a subsection of 3 or not? And I could continue endlessly. – yo' Jul 14 '17 at 18:19
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    I have intentionally enumerated one list 1,2,3 and another a,b,c in order to be able to refer back to individual items from both of them in the same paragraph unambiguously. – Mike Shulman Jul 14 '17 at 21:01
  • Well, then the Copy Editor should understand your reasons and let you do so. But it does not mean that the journal should not set up any standards. OTOH, (with my CopyEd hat on) I wouldn't be really happy about this and would try to suggest an alternative. – yo' Jul 14 '17 at 21:04
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    I don't see why anyone would be unhappy with it. It's just like writing the arguments of one function as f(x1,x2,x3) and another as g(y1,y2,y3) to be able to distinguish them. Requiring the arguments of all functions to be called "x" would be silly. – Mike Shulman Jul 15 '17 at 05:22