Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Just briefly, in reply, I don't imagine that scholars write their 
books differently from the way they write their articles, so 
evidence of sloppy writing in books should provide some basis for 
making assertions about scholarly writing in general. Peer 
reviewers miss many substantive errors in book manuscripts. Is 
there evidence to show that they read journal articles more 
carefully?

As for what is "substantive," surely having the text and the 
equations not "say the same thing" should qualify as 
"substantive," as should also getting "the sums and averages [in 
tables] wrong." And why shouldn't misquoting someone be a 
"substantive" error, especially if one builds a particular 
interpretation upon that misquotation?

Once Harvard begins posting its faculty's articles in its 
repository, the whole world will have an opportunity to see just 
how much of that pre-copyedited writing contains "substantive" 
errors.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>
>wrote:
>
>>  The only statement in Stevan's commentary that I find
>>  surprising and questionable--because it is stated with such
>>  certainty of its truth, with no reference to any empirical
>>  backing, which is unusual for Stevan--is the claim that it is
>>  "exceedingly rare" (Stevan's emphasis) for copyediting "to
>>  detect any substantive errors" in articles. I have no evidence
>>  to disprove this claim that is based on systematic
>>  investigation of my own, but in all the years I spent as a
>>  copyeditor myself, it does not ring true, and was not
>>  consistent with my own experience in editing scholarly work in
>>  the humanities and social sciences.
>
>But Sandy, you were copy-editing books, and I was talking about
>journal articles (OA's target content)!
>
>And during those years you were copy-editing at Princeton, I was
>editing (a journal) at Princeton. My only evidence is from those
>25 years: Lots of substantive errors were caught by the editor
>(me!), but that was part of the peer review, the editor being a
>super-peer. Negligibly few were ever caught by the
>copy-editors...
>
>>  Are the sciences any different? Not according to one editor who
>>  has worked on thousands of scientific articles, who commented
>>  on a draft of my article on "The Value Added by Copyediting"
>>  (Against the Grain, September 2008). Among other things, he
>>  testified that "even in highly technical articles 'the
>>  equations are usually accompanied by thickets of impenetrable
>>  prose,' and a lot of his work 'involves making sure that the
>>  text and the equations say the same thing.' He also adds that
>>  he checks 'the basic math in tables, since it's amazing how
>>  often scientists get the sums and averages wrong.'"
>
>There's a lot of awfully bad writing in science, alas, and the
>copy-editing is usually so light that it doesn't make the writing
>much better. But I said *substantive* errors, and the
>responsibility for catching those is the referees' (and
>editor's), not the copy-editor's.
>
>>  A study by Malcolm Wright and J. Scott Armstrong titled "Fawlty
>>  Towers of Knowledge" in the March/April 2008 issue of
>>  Interfaces also found high rates of errors in citations and
>>  quotations, partly because researchers relied on preprints and
>>  never bothered to check the accuracy of citations and
>>  quotations from those preprints. I would consider these
> > "substantive errors," since they are not simply matters of
> > style or grammar. So, I would ask Stevan whence his high degree
> > of confidence in this claim derives. Nothing in my experience,
>>  or that of other editors I have asked, bears it out.
>
>Sandy and I clearly mean something different by "substantive
>errors": I wouldn't consider citation errors substantive (though
>it's certainly useful to correct them).  I think citations and
>even quotations will be increasingly checked by software, online,
>as everything is made OA. But I agree that only the future will
>decide how much copy-editing service author/institutions will be
>prepared to pay for, if and when journal publishing downsizes to
>just peer-review (plus copy-editing) alone.
>
>Stevan Harnad