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.
I'll try to explain the problem from both perspectives: author and a journal typesetter.
The typesetting process goes as follows:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
