I just finished going over the galley proofs for our newest manuscript, using my good old ‘proofer‘ program. This time I found mostly minor errors on the publisher’s part, including some misplaced thousands separators, misplaced column headings, and missing bold emphases where they should have been. The copyeditors also made a bunch of stylistic and grammatical changes, some of which are listed below.

• while -> whereas
• while -> although
• compared to -> compared with
• comparison to -> comparison with
• i.e. -> i.e.,
• e.g. -> e.g.,
• paper -> article
• here -> herein
• here -> in this study
• above -> earlier
• below -> later
• Hence -> Hence,
• Therefore -> Therefore,
• Firstly, Secondly, Thirdly -> First, Second, Third
• either this, that, or the other -> this, that, or the other
• in order to -> to
• appears -> seems
• dataset -> data set
• E-value -> E value
• overhyphenation (species-level, widely-divergent, higher-level, nearly-core, non-coding, multi-gene, non-zero, maximum-likelihood)
• underhyphenation (high-frequency)

Looking forward to getting this paper finalized! Unfortunately there’s no funding to pay for open access for this paper ($3000), although it will still cost about $850 to publish just due to page charges ($50/page). Sigh.

It definitely makes sense that the above (sorry… ‘earlier’) corrections are worth signing over the copyright (and the $850), since in the end they are much more valuable than the hundreds of hours my co-author and I spent gathering and analyzing the data, writing the paper, responding to reviewer comments, and correcting copyediting mistakes introduced by said publishers. I definitely do not feel ripped off at all.

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