How to politely request to magazine editor for the following issue?

Question

I have one article accepted in the magazine and the editorial team has send me the proof-read version. I have a little issue that I need to change the name of the article as the requirement of my thesis. The article was accepted with the name "Future trends in Personal indoor communication". I want to change it to "Future trends in indoor communication". I will really appreciate if the seniors can comment on my following response.

Dear Mr. Editor,

Thank you for accepting the article titled, “Future trends in Personal Indoor Communication” for publication in IEEE Potentials. As part of the proof-read stage, I would request a minor change in the title. Since my modified PhD thesis title includes “Indoor Communication”, instead of “Personal Indoor Communication”, I will really appreciate if the editor allows me to reflect this change in the mentioned article. This is important to maintain the coherency between my published work and the PhD thesis.

The modification in the title will subsequently require minor (editorial) changes in the text as well. For example, Personal Indoor Communication (or PIC) should be replaced by Indoor Communication (or IC) in the text. Likewise, Fig. 2 should be modified to reflect this change. For this purpose, I have attached the new figure as the supplementary material.

Please do let me know if this is possible. I apologize for the inconvenience it may cause to the publishing team.

Shan Jaffry

On behalf of the Authors

Answer 1

Changing a figure and / or title of a manuscript during proofreading isn't a problem. At most, the production team might wonder if you're changing something that shouldn't be changed (e.g. if the author amends the paper to conform to reviewer comments, and then changes it back during proofreading, we have a problem). However you've given a sensible reason to make the changes, so in all likelihood the production team will just make the changes and move on to the next paper.

As for the letter itself, it's a bit deferential, but journal production administrators see a lot of such letters and won't be fazed. The only thing I'd suggest is that, since you say minor editorial changes are necessary, to also include these in the email, e.g. "on page 2 line 5, change "delete the word 'personal'". This speeds things up: the JPA can make all the changes and the typesetter can implement them at once. Without these changes the JPA would have to write back asking what other changes you want to make before he can pass the manuscript to the typesetter.