Copyediting

The first step of the production process is copyediting. This is sometimes carried out by contracted copyeditors and sometimes by the academic editors of the journal. Regardless of who provides the copyediting service, they'll be looking to bring the formatting and language of your manuscript into line with the journal's house style. This may also involve some minor rewriting of some sections of your paper. Any rewriting should just be cosmetic though – it shouldn't change the meaning of any of your work. You'll have the chance to see the updated version of your manuscript before it's published. For some journals, this will be directly after the copyediting stage, for others, it will be after the article has been typeset.

Jump straight to:

• What do I need to provide for the copyediting stage?
• How should I supply my images and figures?
• What can I change at the copyediting stage?

What do I need to provide for the copyediting stage?

The person who is copyediting your work will need everything that is going to go into the final version of your article. This will usually include (but is not necessarily limited to):

• The final title for your article
• Your abstract
• A list of keywords (check the journal style guide to see how many you should provide)
• The full text of your article (including footnotes, citations, etc.)
• A short biography for each author

In most cases, the journal editor will already have all of this – sometimes you'll need to provide things like your keywords or biography after acceptance though.

How should I supply my images and figures?

Different publishers will ask you to supply files in different ways, so it's always best to check the information that they've provided you with. You should be able to find this in the information that comes with your acceptance letter or in the submission guidelines on the journal website.

In general though, you'll need to supply your images and figures in separate files. For EUP, we ask for images to be provided as either JPG or TIFF files. You’ll also need to provide all of your captions. Captions can be embedded within your document to help show where the images and figures should appear or provided as a separate list. If the publisher you're working with requires one or the other, they should make this clear to you.

Most publishers will also state a minimum resolution for any images. We need most images to be 300dpi at the size they'll be when printed in the journal (line drawings should be 1200dpi). A good way to check whether you have a high enough resolution for your image is to look in 'image properties' in a programme like Photoshop or GIMP. This will tell you the resolution of your image at a given print size. If the resolution is below the level required by the publisher at the size the image will be printed, you'll need to seek a higher-quality version of the image to send in for production.

While you're checking the resolution for your figures and images, it's a good idea to make sure that you have all of the other things that are related to them as well. For your image or figure to be included in your final article, you'll need to send the publisher:

• A caption (including copyright notes where applicable)
• An alt-text description to make it more accessible
• An in-text citation, reference or 'call out' to the image or figure within the text of your manuscript (this can be as basic as a note somewhere near where the figure will appear to say 'see figure 1')
• An indication of where you'd like it to appear in the text (something along the lines of <Fig 1 near here> is usually enough)

You'll also need to make sure that you have secured any relevant permissions. Some publishers will ask you to send evidence of the permissions, others will just need you to sign a form confirming that you have them and can provide them in the case of any disputes.

What can I change at the copyediting stage?

After the copyeditor has made changes, you'll have the chance to check over their work. Often, you won't be able to make these checks until after the paper has been typeset. Either way, before publication, you can approve or reject some of the changes that have been made and make minor changes of your own.

When you start looking through the changes made by the copyeditor, it's good to begin by looking for any terms that you've used which are specific to your discipline – especially those that have any unusual capitalisation or are close in spelling to more common terms. Copyeditors often work across multiple journals and fields, so may not be familiar with all of the jargon in every one of them. Those changes, which seem like minor typo corrections to non-experts, can have a huge impact on your article, so it's best to make sure that they're switched back.

After that, you should read through the new version of your article, checking and addressing the edits as you go. Keep in mind that the journal style for things like capitalisation, punctuation and even spelling (in English, particularly US vs UK spelling) may not match your own preferences. It's helpful to have a copy of the journal style guide to hand if it's available. Many publishers will either send you a copy of the style guide or provide a version of it online. If you change something out of the journal's house style, you should provide an explanation of why this is necessary. Without an explanation, it's very likely that your change will be undone before the final version of your paper is published.

While checking the copyeditor's corrections, you may also notice some minor spelling or grammatical errors that they've missed or perhaps come across a couple of sentences that don't quite read right anymore. It's fine to make changes to these – as long as they're only cosmetic. You cannot make any changes to the substance of your manuscript at this stage. That means no adding or removing references, replacing something that a reviewer asked you to remove, etc. In most cases, these sorts of changes will simply be rejected by the editor or the publisher. In extreme cases though, it may mean that your paper needs to move back into the peer review stage of the process.

If you find any factual errors that have been in your paper throughout the review process at this stage, particularly those that could change someone's understanding of your work, contact the editor. These mistakes need to be addressed as early as possible to avoid the need for errata or corrigenda. However, as they are larger changes than would usually be expected at the copyediting stage, they need editorial approval.

Where to now?

• Back: Getting permission to reuse content
• Next: Typesetting and proofreading
• Return to the ECR Hub homepage
• Ready to submit your article? Find the full list of Edinburgh University Press journals that you can submit to here