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Often the publisher requests to get the proof within 24 hours when it's ready. What are the reasons for making this so short? Do they want the authors to not make too many changes?

EDIT: The email I received said:

Please ensure you check the entire article carefully, and answer all queries. Return corrected proofs and any related material by uploading to the site within 24 hours.

EDIT: @StrongBad pointed out a related question.

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Memming
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    Yes, an interesting question considering that usually one's wait for these galleys is months on end, with no accurately predicted deadline... – paul garrett Aug 11 '14 at 14:47

9 Answers9

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I'll try to explain the problem from both perspectives: author and a journal typesetter.

The typesetting process goes as follows:

  1. We pre-plan the issue contents 2 months in advance, in order to balance the issues in size. This is necessary for small journals with 4 or 6 issues per year, not quite for large journals with a long publishing queue. At this moment, we take articles that are accepted. If there's not enough of them, we go through the queue and try to find articles that can be accepted quickly.

  2. Now the authors provide the final version. This takes some time, so I receive the articles usually 4-6 weeks before the issue date. That's not a lot of time.

  3. Most articles are typeset within 1-2 weeks after I receive them. With these, there's no problem at all. However, then you have articles that take more time, since the quality of the figures is being discussed, as well as semantics (when the formatting from the authors is poor and the semantics are not clear) etc. This takes some time. So it can happen that the article is typeset like 2 weeks before the issue date, or even less.

  4. So now the article is typeset and is with the authors for proofs. Any correction they make has to be incorporated. Sometimes it's not easy (requests for replacing a figure with a better one, for moving figures to other pages etc. are not uncommon). Sometimes I strongly disagree with the authors on these. In such cases, we need to have yet another couple mails exchanged or the chief editor involved, and that takes time again. At this moment you see that 24 or 48 hours can be the maximum we can give.

  5. Once all articles get back, the issue has to be made ready, articles published online, CrossRef+Scopus metadata prepared, DOI registered etc.

That's the perspective of the journal I typeset. I hope that it is clear that the publication comprises a lot of steps. When the authors are cooperative and reasonable, everything goes fluently and the final version is ready 4 weeks before deadline. And then you have cases when things don't go quite well, and you get very close to the deadlines.

Moreover, to make things easier (and reduce the amount of work just before the issue date), you leave authors quite a short time for response. In most cases, there is plenty of time left, but if 80% of people misuse this time, we work 16 hours a day the last 3 days before the issue date to sort everything out, and we simply want to avoid this.

From the perspective of the author, 48 hours is not much for proofreading an article, especially since this has to be done very carefully. However, in most cases, if you ask for extension (a 5-line mail with a very short request is enough), it will be granted without any problem. Just please don't misuse the possibility.

yo'
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    These timings don't fit with my experience as an author (presumably because of being in a field that works on a different timescale). It can be over a year between the journal receiving the final version of the paper (already typeset, just in a different layout) and the author receiving the proofs (often edited to create major errors that completely change the meaning or turn the work to nonsense). After the 2/3 days given to the author to send back the re-edits, the paper appears online, in final form except page numbers etc. A couple of months later, the paper makes it to a journal issue. – Jessica B Aug 19 '14 at 19:43
  • @JessicaB That's quite possible. The publish queue is probably quite long in the journals, right? And yes, the timings are quite field-dependent, and even journal-dependent. I only tried to explain from the view of the journal that the things aren't quite simple. – yo' Aug 19 '14 at 19:51
  • @Yo'. Thanks! Traditionally. How long it takes by the designers to prepare Galley proofs ? – goro May 16 '16 at 09:40
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    @goro Somewhere between 10 minutes and 1 hour per page. But remember that most copy editors have other things to do as well, the backlogs of their work range from zero to months, and at least from my own experience, you can't do typesetting 8 hours straight because it's very tough on your eyes and you need breaks when you do other stuff. – yo' May 21 '16 at 21:40
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    All of the arguments on this answer hinge on the existence of deadlines caused by the need to balance issues in print. There might be people out there that care about the printed versions of their papers this side of the year 2000, but I have yet to meet them. As it stands from your argument, then, the imposition of extreme deadlines on authors without a warning is pretty much just based on a legacy practice that the journal feels bolsters its commercial negotiating position but from which the author gets zero meaninful benefit. So... why should authors comply with that deadline, again? – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 16:56
  • @E.P. Well, I tried to explain how it is in some journals. Of course, you can answer by swearing over the publishers bullying the authors, but I'm not sure it makes any sense :-) – yo' Feb 07 '18 at 17:34
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    Well, this answer is an apology of some pretty unreasonable behaviour on the part of publishers that, as you explained, are exclusively due to constraints that benefit the publisher and not the author. It might not look like that from that close up, but the structure is all there if you zoom out. There definitely is lots that could be accomplished by reasonable voices within publishing arguing for a move to paperless systems that would actually implement their stated mission of serving the scientific community efficiently and cost-effectively, ... – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 17:43
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    ... but then that might crumble the facade-level pretense that publishers are anything other than vested interests trying to wrest as much money as possible out of the taxpayer via scientific institutions. So yeah, the incentives need to be created from the side of the demand, but the "we're here to serve" spiel just becomes increasingly untenable as time wears on. – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 17:43
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Galley proofs are part of the production process where a book or journal issue is actually printed, as opposed to the 'softer' process of deciding what pieces will go into it and in what form. As such, the deadlines for their revision are associated with the physical production process rather than the editorial process for the piece and can be quite different from deadlines for e.g. minor revisions or revise-and-resubmit requests.

These proofs are only meant to be used to check that the typesetting correctly represents the author's intent, and not that the content is scientifically correct (which should have been done at an earlier stage). Occasionally a one- or two-sentence 'note added in proof' may be appended to a paper but that's about it; for an example see the AIP style guide, p.11. Checking the typesetting is assumed to be a straightforward matter that does not require more than one day (though assuming that an academic can spare the time at the publisher's decision with no prior notice is another matter), so such deadlines are usually OK.

Note also that such deadlines can be negotiable if properly handled. If such a requests lands on you and you will not be able to complete it in time, it is usually acceptable to notify the editor, as soon as possible, that this is the case. A polite note along the lines of

Dear Editor,

We have successfully received the proofs of our article. Unfortunately, today is my thesis defence, my coauthor is getting married and my advisor is away due to travel, so we will be unable to complete your request to review the proofs within 24h. We will get them to you as soon as possible, which will likely be the day after tomorrow. Is this acceptable, or will it lead to a delay in publication?

can work wonders in stretching such a deadline. From personal experience, I have seen a 24-hour request be stretched to a full week without a publication delay.

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E.P.
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    Or, for instance, the journal could send you a notice on Christmas Eve to return the page proofs. (This happened to me recently!) – aeismail Aug 11 '14 at 18:04
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    The high-probability explanation of this capriciousness is that they think they can "get away with it", given the circumstances. Remaining silent for months, and then giving someone a 24-hour deadline is ... let's face it... grossly disrespectful. Power-inequity manifest. Explanation-over. :) – paul garrett Aug 12 '14 at 00:17
  • @paulgarrett Right, to an exntent. However, I don't think that in many branches there's monopoly or oligopoly. You can choose journals based on their galley proofs time, if you wish :-) – yo' Feb 07 '18 at 09:46
  • @yo' I find that to be extremely disingenuous. The power disparity between journals and authors is plain as day except, apparently, to the people with a vested interest in keeping it around. – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 16:50
  • I don't say I disagree. But still, it's a marketplace and it works like this. I don't consider my last comment ethical or non-ethical and I don't discuss the power distribution in the whole thing. I just state the facts. And frankly, unless there is a incentive for the journals to change their minds, they won't; so if you want to change things, you have to create the incentive. – yo' Feb 07 '18 at 17:16
  • @yo' You were responding to a comment that was explicitly about, in paul's words, "power-inequity manifest". I don't see how you might manage to not discuss the power distribution in the whole thing ─ I really do know that it wasn't your intent at all, but I'm really struggling to see your initial comment here as anything other than "that's right, we the journals have you by the (expletive), suck it up or don't publish at all". You're right that incentives need to be created and all, but I don't see how snark from people with vested interests helps. – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 17:28
  • (That's probably more bile from my side than intended, btw; let's not escalate this into a pointless argument. But please do reconsider how your comments read from an external perspective.) – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 17:29
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    Ok, I really meant it as saying: Well, unless you do something about it, nobody will, because the publishers certainly won't. (I see now how that this is not how one would read it though. And I'm quite unsure what to do now.) – yo' Feb 07 '18 at 17:32
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – E.P. Feb 07 '18 at 17:45
  • You talk about only checking the formatting as an author. However, every single time I have received proofs they managed to alter more than just formatting. Newly introduced spelling errors and worse mistakes are frustratingly common. Unless they explicitly mark their changes (some do!), checking can be tedious. – user53923 Jul 30 '21 at 16:18
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As I said in my answer to How much time is usually left for authors to return page proofs? What happens if I am late?, I have never seen a 24 hour turn around time requirement, but 48-72 hours seems quite common. I think there are two reasons for the turn around time to be on the order of days. From my experience, publishers are working on a tight schedule; there might only be a month or two between when the proofs are finished and the issue is delivered to subscribers. If an article needs to be re-typeset or delayed to a later issue, the publisher will need to rework the the entire issue which is going to take some time. It seems that with their time scale the longest they could wait for proofs would be two weeks. This leads to the second issue. Academics do not handle deadlines well and publishers need to handle the articles from the worst procrastinators amongst us. If you give a bunch of academics a deadline in 2 weeks a non-insignificant portion will take over a month. Quick, cheap, paper based publications with flexible deadlines for authors and reviewers just isn't practical.

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StrongBad
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    I am not convinced by this argument. Most journals today typeset every article in a new page, so there is basically no need to change anything to shift a paper to a later issue. The only thing that changes is the page number. Moreover, excluding special issues, it seems far more sensible to allocate a paper to an issue after the authors return the corrected proofs. – Federico Poloni Aug 11 '14 at 16:42
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    @FedericoPoloni I don't understand the printing process but printed journals are not just a bunch of stapled/glued together pages. Further, if the journal has some color pages, but not all, that can make a big difference to the layout. Many journals also have advertisements which may also need to be repositioned. My guess is that the publishers think the current system is sensible enough. I don't have much faith in publishers, but I would think that the system would change if enough people required extensions. – StrongBad Aug 11 '14 at 16:54
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    I guess we are simply in different fields then. As far as I can tell, in mathematics a journal is just a bunch of articles stapled togethers, each printed on different pages. Advertising and other editorial content is minimal or non-existent and is never on the same pages as the papers. – Federico Poloni Aug 11 '14 at 20:17
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    Again, if the publisher is silent for several months, which is the norm in mathematics, and then sends me an email telling me I need to do something within 24 hours, ... – paul garrett Aug 12 '14 at 00:19
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    @FedericoPoloni Even in mathematics, most journal issues are more than just a bunch of articles stapled together. Respectable-looking journals are bound, and (if I remember correctly from when I was a managing editor) that requires the number of pages to be divisible by 8. There might be other constraints that I'm not remembering now (or perhaps never knew). – Andreas Blass Aug 12 '14 at 03:00
  • @AndreasBlass Interesting to know. I was (probably wrongly) not using "stapled" in its literal sense in my previous comment, but it's interesting to know that there is this constraint, too. What did you people do when the total number of pages of the articles ready for production was not a multiple of 8? – Federico Poloni Aug 12 '14 at 08:48
  • @FedericoPoloni I have no idea exactly what the layout team does, but I am pretty sure most print journal, with the possible exception of AMS journals who may use the unaltered LaTeX, spend considerable time laying out each issue. – StrongBad Aug 12 '14 at 09:49
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    @FedericoPoloni The journal I was editing, the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, had some leeway in formatting (and sometimes even delaying) things other than regular papers --- things like membership lists, meeting reports, etc. In the worst case, on blank age at the end wouldn't be a disaster. But I know that the people working on layout put in considerable effort to make things fit well. – Andreas Blass Aug 12 '14 at 14:56
  • Laying out a publication such as a magazine or journal is very much like solving a crossword puzzle...you have certain constraints put on you by the printing process itself. A press form is typically 16 pages... 8 per side. So a publication is most efficiently printed in multiples of 16 pages. You can also have 1/2 sheets that have 8 pgs., 4 per side, but that means more press runs, more setups, more forms to fold in the bindery. The layout process also takes into account the most efficient use of color...if you can "gang up" all your color plates on the same side of a sheet, it's cheaper. – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 16:57
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Your paper ought to be in pretty good shape after you get to the point of galley proofs. At that point, you are really just checking to be sure that their typesetters didn't introduce errors. All of your own typos and requests from reviewers should have been fixed by the time you get there.

Bill Barth
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    There was one paper that had the typesetting introduced hundreds of errors. It was an equation heavy paper in a biological journal. That took less than a day, but I only worked on that paper that day... – Memming Aug 11 '14 at 14:51
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    If that happens, you can ask for an extension. – Bill Barth Aug 11 '14 at 14:52
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    @Memming Indeed in that situation, when yo say "You made so many errors that I cannot complete correction in one day", they can hardly deny you an extension ... – Hagen von Eitzen Aug 12 '14 at 09:41
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Short galley proof delays are not universal, in particular for journals having no print edition. I am involved in the copyediting phase of the LMCS journal (called "layout editing"), which is an arXiv overlay journal. When we modify articles for style or typographical reasons, we give authors 2 weeks to verify our work (sending them the new PDF plus a LaTeX diff). The 2-week deadline is really to put a deadline, but there really is no urgency. When the authors approve, the paper gets assigned an issue and the final version is published in that issue.

My understanding is that the galley proof step with short deadline is because, with print journals, some editing must occur as part of the preparation of a specific print issue, and fit in the production timeline for that issue. But once you get rid of the print version (and who reads academic journals on paper nowadays?), the problem simply goes away.

a3nm
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Speaking as a former Design Director, Typographer, and Production Manager of many publications and also of national-market print advertising work:

The reason that there's a tight deadline for authors' galley proofs is because of what galley proofs are for: evaluating whether the formatting has introduced any issues with readability or meaning; whether there's any typos or format errors; whether there's any omissions or duplications.

The turnaround is tight because it's part of the production phase, not part of the editorial phase. The time to edit and re-write and fuss over the article is done and gone. Galley proofs is a final reality check, not a chance to revisit that awkward sentence in the 4th 'graph.

Traditionally in print, editorial and not production is given the luxury of extra time. Usually there is no luxury of time, in spite of what it appears to the author. Most journals have a lot more production steps to go through and are very close to press time when the authors' proofs go out. It may seem like "not a big deal," but a printing operation has scheduled their presstime very closely, and if your book is late, it gets bumped from the schedule in favor of something that is actually ready for press. If your book is bumped from the press schedule, it might be days or weeks before it can slot back in. The cost to "hold" the press is spectacularly prohibitive.

Production and pre-press times are shrinking these days, it's easier today and faster to get a book to press than it was in, say, 1985. In many ways that exacerbates the problem with proofs turnaround...there's just no "fiddle" time anymore.

dwoz
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    But nowadays many major publishing companies release journal articles online several months before they appear in the journal issue. Why does it matter if an article appears online three months and three weeks before the absolutely identical version gets published or three months and two weeks before the absolutely identical version gets published? – Pete L. Clark Oct 08 '15 at 04:36
  • In the non-academic press, a publication (i.e. magazine) with a cover date of January 2016 would be delivered to subscribers and newsstands/bookstores no later than mid-December 2015; To do this the skids of finished magazines have to be at the post office in the first week of December. If your publication has, say, a 100k print run (a bit bigger than your typical academic journal) a large bindery operation needs three or four days...five days if it's a smaller bindery. That means it has to be off the press before the last day of November. – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 16:40
  • Let's say your publication is five forms (5 x 16 pgs.) two of which are color. Modern presses run at about 10k impressions for sheet, 30k impressions for web. You've got five set-ups and five runs...a couple days if your press only runs one shift. Prepress for that is a day or so, and so the latest you can be at the printer is the beginning of the fourth week of November. But when you send your materials to the printer, they have to make proofs (blue-lines or some other proofs that show full sheet impositions). Those proofs need about 4 days to turn around, so we're back to mid-november. – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 16:43
  • It takes a week or so to do the composition and layout and final fussing-around with a five-form publication (80 pgs or so). That means that we need the authors' proofs back by the first week in November, for a commercial publication. An academic journal needs a longer lead time, because the people who have to read and approve things are, well, academics and not full-time publication people. So the proof cycles are that much longer. This should help you understand why a publication with a January cover date needs to be wrapped up by the beginning of November! – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 16:48
  • also...forgot to mention that Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, all fall within that timeframe...so add ANOTHER week. We're back to October. – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 16:49
  • I am talking about academic presses, and in particular mathematics, where color is very rare. Here is an example: this article was published online on March 27, 2014. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11083-014-9323-y#/page-1. It appeared in the July 2015 issue. If you check out the journal's website, you'll see that articles typically wait for a year or more before being placed in an issue. Clearly this is not proceeding on anything like the timeline you suggest. – Pete L. Clark Oct 08 '15 at 20:11
  • Are you suggesting that your single specific example means that I'm "wrong?" – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 21:43
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    Academic presses have extended timelines, because the reviewers, editors, people-who-must-sign-off, are often not terribly available. They hew not to the paper-author's beck and call. – dwoz Oct 08 '15 at 21:44
  • It's not a single example but an entire journal published by one of the two largest academic publishing companies. And it's not a matter of "wrong" but describing different things: articles in popular magazines are rarely written a year before they are published. I'm giving explicit examples to show that academic articles often sit -- publicly available, in a finished form -- online for more than a year before they find their way into an issue. I have over two dozen publications. When, recently, one of them appeared in the same year it was submitted, I was completely shocked. – Pete L. Clark Oct 08 '15 at 23:48
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    @Pete L. Clark: I would imagine that your very prestigious and wonderful mathematical journal is given an outright insulting budget for print publication, and so have to keep the size of each issue within budget-driven constraints. That means the book can't just grow because your amazing and deserving paper walked in the door. They've already got enough fascinating papers to carry them through next year, so yours just goes into the queue. – dwoz Oct 09 '15 at 22:56
  • I don't understand what you're getting at (and I really don't understand why you've chosen such a sarcastic tone). Publication queues are understandable and necessary in the current system: no one was complaining about them. What is more recent is the phenomenon of journals releasing the papers online more than a year before they are formally published in the sense of appearing in an issue. This also a very positive practice. It's just that if a paper stays "on deck" for more than a year, then it's clear that waiting a few more days on the proofs would not cause publication delays. – Pete L. Clark Oct 10 '15 at 01:53
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    You're right, Pete...that was altogether too sarcastic. The problem is, people with ONE point of reference deem their experience to be the "standard" against which others are evaluated, when in reality, they have absolutely no idea what is going on. It's part of the "me, mine" mentality that is infecting the entire world these days...people think it's "all about them," and then discount as irrelevant information that most decidedly speaks to their issue. this is the case here, where a decades-veteran of publications is discounted because "that's not how math journals I know about" do it. – dwoz Oct 12 '15 at 04:13
  • None of the things that you put in quotation marks were said by me or anyone here. When two people with substantial expertise give differing advice, it is likely that they are both correctly describing two different things, and we should try to find out what those are. Most of the users on this site are in STEM academia, for which a very small number of very large publishers dominate the market, especially Elsevier and Springer. Have you worked for these academic publishing companies? If not, which ones? – Pete L. Clark Oct 12 '15 at 19:44
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In addition to the fact that in most cases you can easily check the proofs within a day, I would assume that it’s also more efficient for the typesetters and in particular the copy editors in the case that you actually want to correct something as they are still familiar with your paper and are thus faster at applying your corrections. For example, after one day a copy editor usually remembers the reason and context of a particular change and can thus faster work your corrections.

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  • (I'm a journal typesetter.) No, it's not really easy to proofread a paper. We sometimes make lots of changes and lots of things can go bad, even if we try that not to happen. – yo' Aug 12 '14 at 13:17
  • @tohecz: Did I ever claim something different? (I only claimed that it’s usually easily possible for the authors to check the proofs within a day.) Also, if you are involved in typesetting: Can you confirm my assumption? – Wrzlprmft Aug 12 '14 at 14:36
  • Now I feel that I wanted to comment another answer, sorry for that. Anyways for your question: I think it depends. It's certainly more comfortable to keep the article with me for as short time as possible, but I don't consider having to return to it a problem. It's more the overall complexity of the process that makes us impose short deadlines on proofs. – yo' Aug 12 '14 at 14:46
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    And yes, you can check the proofs within a "normal day", however, people seem not to have many "normal days" -- all the time you have seminars, teaching activities, board meetings, scheduled discussions with students, travelling, etc. It's sometimes hard to find spare 3 hours within consecutive 3 days, not to speak within 1 day. – yo' Aug 12 '14 at 14:46
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The reason is simply that nobody is expected to make any changes to the galley proofs. The content and the basic wording of the paper is fixed after acceptance. No rewriting or reformulating is allowed at this stage. The authors should only check if the typesetting and copy editing did not introduce any errors. Often you are also given a list of changes that the copy editor made and you can also work through this list. In other words, the author is only expected to read the galley proofs once and only with the "correctness lens". This could be done in less then 24 hours in almost all circumstances. In exceptional cases you may well ask for deadline extension.

Dirk
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    I don't find this a compelling reason. I agree that normally it takes less than 24 hours to check the proofs; let's say reasonably one hour or two. But they could be sending them in what is a busy day for me. For what they know, I could be on holiday, or it could be the day of my PhD defence, or my wedding day. – Federico Poloni Aug 11 '14 at 15:23
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    @FedericoPoloni, of course. And, as I have ranted above, how could there be a 24-hour quasi-emergency after months of silence from them, etc. For-profit publishers are, if only by accident or economic necessity, bullies. – paul garrett Aug 12 '14 at 00:20
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    @paulgarrett In my field non-profit publishers are following exactly the same practices. Physical publishing of journals (which in my opinion is totally useless) automatically requires good publishing practices. If academicians do not insist physical publishing, and could manage online journals, problem would have been automatically solved and many cost saved. – Greg Aug 12 '14 at 07:12
  • @FedericoPoloni, normally, the typesetter would contact you in advance, saying on WHICH day the proofs will reach you. Then it is up to you to accommodate sufficient time for the proofreading on that or the following day... – al_b Aug 12 '14 at 13:07
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    @al_b, I have never had any accurate advance warning of when the proofs are coming - the acceptance email says wait for proofs, after that you're at the mercy of the publication workflow. The only errors that have been introduced in my papers have been easy-to-find/fix breaking of formulae, but there's no guarantee that an author will even see the email within 24 hours (and therefore no opportunity to ask for an extension). That said I don't think they really expect every proof to be returned in that timescale. – Chris H Aug 12 '14 at 14:36
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The proof is an actually typesetted version of your paper, ready to production. In other words, everything is ready that someone pushes a button and the press can print the issue. This is the very last "lets check it one more time" thing.

For this reason:

  • If you have a correction, it is actually cost money to them.
  • If there is 50 paper in the journal, and 10 out of the 50 start rewriting the paper in the last minute, then the production line waits till everything is fixed, reformatted, again cost money. A lot.

Before anyone starts to complain about the 24 hr (which is common in my field, too), let us be a little professional.
Your paper should anyway be free of errors and well written at the point of submission. Then several referees check it back and force, as well as you are free to check your manuscript if you are not sure. When you are at the proof stage, your paper has already read and checked by several people, several times for months. You don't have a good reason to re-write anything, except if there is an error due to typesetting. In other worlds, if you done your job decently, you don't have more than 5 min job with that proof in 99% of the time.

Greg
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    Actually, the typesetting process often introduces many errors for some reason. I think the publisher somehow 'retypes' all the text which seems bizarre in this digital age (but then again, this publisher didn't like LaTeX and insisted on converting everything to MS Word). Though you are right that it costs the publisher a lot of effort (and some money) to change things at this stage. – Memming Aug 12 '14 at 04:44
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    @Memming It may vary publisher by publisher. I have seen less than 5 genuine typos/mistakes in proofs so far, but I met dozens of professors who wanted to change the title or conclusion in the proof (directly editing the PDF), which makes me sympathetic toward publishers in this question. – Greg Aug 12 '14 at 07:15
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    @Memming It depends. Sometimes it happens I introduce rather stupid mistakes even if I pay a lot of attention. One example for all: A figure with two graphs got change from top-bottom to left-right layout, but I forgot to change one in-text reference from "top" to "left". Certainly: The idea that you can proofread an article in 5 minutes is a bad idea. I, the typesetter, am not responsible for mistakes I introduce, in the sense that you cannot be angry at me that I made a mistake and you missed it during proofs. – yo' Aug 12 '14 at 14:16
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    @Greg I think there's a misunderstanding. I wrote that comment with my LaTeX typesetter hat on, I made a mistake during the processing of an article of someone else, when I needed to re-arrange the figures to better fit them. – yo' Aug 12 '14 at 16:23
  • @tohecz (sorry, I am missed you are a typesetter) By the time I publish a paper I really know all the key point by heart. 5 minutes is maybe an exaggeration, but someone who is familiar with the text should able to check if all the equations, figures are correct or not in very short time. If someone messes up a figure that I worked for hours and redone 5 times, I don't need an hour to catch it. If the typesetter misspell an adjective that no way influence the readability my results and conclusions and I cannot catch it with one read - I live with it, and sleep well. – Greg Aug 12 '14 at 16:31
  • @yo' How on Earth does the proposition that you are not responsible for the errors you introduce makes sense to you? – user354948 May 03 '22 at 20:20