Thank you for your letter requesting me to write a book review of --- by --- --- for your journal. I regret that, for the reasons described below, I am unable to oblige you.
I recognize that the game of "Author *contra* Publisher", in which the author attempts to write something that makes sense and the editors and typesetters attempt to mangle it without getting caught, is a time-honored tradition among academic periodicals; and I have grown at least to tolerate it, if not actually to enjoy it. However, I feel strongly that your journal's policy of refusing to grant reviewers any opportunity to correct proofs of their reviews is unfair, unsportsmanlike, and not in keeping with the spirit of the game.
This was forcibly borne in upon me when I read in a recent issue your printed version of my review of --- and saw that an ingenious member of the opposing team had altered the word "whiggishly" (as in "whig history") to "waggishly", which of course is completely meaningless in the context of what I wrote.
Therefore, at the risk of being dismissed as merely a sore loser, I must decline to write any further reviews for your journal until your editorial staff sees fit to level the playing field for AcP. In the meantime, I remain, dear Sir,
Very truly yours, etc.
And I’m gonna send it, too, by gum. Jackasses. :mad:
I’ve never heard of a process by which a reviewer is not permitted to see the page proofs of his review. This is completely unheard of and extremely unethical.
We give our authors ample opportunity to submit any corrections of their papers after they’ve viewed the proofs; we sometimes, upon request, send a final copy to them after their changes have been implemented.
You the man, dan! But it sounds like you don’t work for the Journal of — ---; they let article authors correct page proofs, but not authors of 800-word book reviews.
What really chaps my tuchus about this particular “emendation” is that it’s pretty obvious that no human thought actually went into figuring out what the word was supposed to mean. Probably somebody’s spell-checker didn’t recognize “whiggishly” so they just threw in the suggested word that looked closest to it. Way to show respect for the labors of scholarly research, folks. :mad:
Well, we will on occasion come across a decidedly nonscientific term in a manuscript, and we will almost always delete it - but we will send a note to the author explaining the decision and asking them to substitute a more suitable word. We don’t use a spellcheck here (currently) for the vast majority of our articles; they’re all edited by hand. (There is a strong push to do them all electronically, but the speed bump has been the difficulty in finding software that correctly emulates mathemathical equations in a word processing format.)
wait til Zotti hears about this! why they obviously didn’t read his announcement at the top of each forum! what kind of ijiot doesn’t notice something called ‘annou…’’
::whisper whisper whisper whisper::
what’s that? she’s not ranting about other dopers? OH…
[emily latille voice on] Nevermind[/emily latille voice]