Elsevier production team messed up my paper. What should I do?

Question

I have a paper accepted by a journal of Elsevier, and it went under production for 3 months. Yet the production team has not been able to fix certain problems with typesetting which appeared during the proofreading. After the first month, I received the proofreading notification. The first production of my paper was really bad: a lot of errors in equations, symbols, figures and tables. So I prepared and submitted a lengthy list of request for correction, with as much information as possible.

A few days later, I received a strange email from the journal manager (who is said to be affiliated with Elsevier Global Journals Production), telling me that the production team has to ignore my request as it may cause them too much trouble. I gave a full explanation to this manager about how bad it is with the production and the request has to be processed. In the end, the manager agreed to make the corrections.

Two or three weeks later, my paper went directly online (early access), with all the typesetting problems unfixed, and even had some extra new problems. I was very worried because my paper DOI already took effect. I never heard of a paper which is already put online (for public download) can be fixed again. The journal manager apologized to me, saying that the production team was busy with other papers, but they will fix the problems and get back to me with another proofreading. Two months have passed, and I have yet to receive my second proofreading.

I fear the production team is just trying to avoid the proofreading by intentionally postponing, in an attempt to reach a point where it becomes officially impossible to make changes. As a matter of fact, my paper's official issue date is coming near, and the production team is probably already planning to have an early Christmas.

Question

What shall I do to change the result?

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NOTE 1: And NO, it is not about aesthetics.

NOTE 2: I am not trying to be a PITA. Considering that I contributed a lot to Elsevier by being a frequent and responsible reviewer and yet received a very poor production of my paper, I am simply very disappointed.

The following is a demonstration of the kind of work I receive on my own paper. An altered equation is manufactured to accurately reflect a true situation.

Original equation:

Production:

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Concluding remarks

I would like to thank all the people who have offered me valuable suggestion. As a matter of fact, after I posted this question here yesterday, I received a notification email, that I have been waiting for, for proofreading today. There are still many unsolved problems, but at least it is a good start. I would like to think my post somehow helped change the situation for the better.

My OP and comments might have caused some confusion and probably even dissatisfication as my posts usually do. It is probably because: I did not spend hours writing down every bit of details about the whole situation; I am not a native user of English language. But maybe most of all, because I was a little bit angry and that could be contageous. Therefore, my apologies. On the other hand, there is really no need for some of the repliers to call me a ranter. It is a hurtful language. I get that you are experts on this and many more forums and can't wait to show people your expertise. However,You really did not help and you have wasted your time. Please do yourself a favor and leave me alone.

About my attitude toward Elsevier, I'm not saying Elsevier this and that. It is probably one of the oldest publishers around, and probably the biggest contributer to dissemination of knowledge (its pricing policy being another matter). I am saying what it is: they messed up my paper and the first thing their production team did is to persuade me to give up trying to make corrections. I have worked with almost all the major publishers, and never have I encountered such a situation. To Elsevier from a contributor, you should hire more people for your production team, and I don't know, pay them more?

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Lessons learned:

1. Don't expect the Elsevier production team to look into your TeX file, such as noticing the specified width/height of figures. You need to deliver a foolproof source package to them. In particular, Set BB size to actual figure size in the paper (ghostscript could do the job).

2. Elsevier production team doesn't like table cell shadings, not even non-cosmetic shadings (It should probably be put down in the instruction).

3. Elsevier team is not very good with math fonts. One should probably write an instruction of the symbols used in his/her paper.

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Update

The manager got back to me again, much quicker this time, with an update. And they did the cell shading for me this time. Just so you know they didn't consider cell shading as "definitely violating" any standards. Not that I encourage people to use cell shading.

Update in 2018

I had the chance to work with the same journal again this year. I have to say the situation with the production team has improved dramatically! They respond much more quickly and the proofreading is much more professional (the software they use seem to have improved too). Many thanks to them (although I could not and probably should not name the journal) and Elsevier for the fine service they provide now.

This result is made possible, probably also because of the extensive measures I took to pre-process all figures, which I'd like to share here:

As most people know, transparency is usually flattened before the final production. However, hand in transparent figures directly to publishers will usually cause unforeseen results, due to the software incompatibility. My suggestion would be to manually reduce your figures to only two layers, one with all vector graphics, the other below it containing a rasterized version of all transparent objects (along with other raster contents). It is also suggested to simplify the vector graphics for smaller file size and faster onscreen generation. It might help to emphasize this to the production team too.

It occurs to me that figure sizing as in \includegraphics[width=...,height=]{figure} are sometimes unfortunately ignored in production. Therefore, it is suggested that one compiles all his or her figures separately, using \documentclass[multi=< environment name for starting a new page >,preview]{standalone} so that the figures are properly resized before being inserted back into the paper using \includegraphics{figure}, i.e., without size specification.

Hope that helps.

Answer 1

You could try contacting the editor in chief of the journal to see if they could get the problem fixed. This worked for me when I had similar problems with a paper last year.

Answer 2

Based on your comments, the typesetting problems are not just about ugly formatting, but they actually change the meaning of the article (and significantly increase the chance that people will misread it).

This is not explained clearly in your question.

Did you explain it clearly to the journal manager?

He might think that you are a perfectionist who is being a PITA because you want everything to look perfect. If he does think so, he would still be wrong, but the main issue here is how to convince him to correct the problems immediately.

Do not say: "The typesetting is all wrong!", like you did here. Typesetting is not the first priority.

Instead communicate clearly that "The errors introduced during the proofreading change the meaning of the article. The changed statements in the proof are plainly incorrect, and do not match my manuscript."

If you don't get anywhere with the journal manager, then talk to the editor. Emphasize that this is not just about formatting, but the meaning of the paper has been corrupted.

Unfortunately, I have witnessed such problems myself: whoever typeset the formulas had about zero understanding of basic mathematics and mathematical typesetting. Not only did they break all math typesetting conventions, making the formulas hard to read, but they actually changed the meaning of the formulas.

Answer 3

Independently from whether you can get Elsevier to fix the problems that they introduced, my recommendation would be to take your own version of the paper (the one that you produced yourself, without the additional errors) and deposit that version to an open repository, e.g., arXiv. (Depending on the journal, it is probably possible to do this while respecting the copyright transfer agreement that you may have signed.) If you use arXiv, it's probably a good idea to fill in the DOI field (to keep the link with the Elsevier version), and indicate in the comments field, e.g., that the deposited version is free of publisher-introduced errors.

That way, if Elsevier doesn't fix the problems in their version, at least you can direct your readers to the arXiv version. And even if Elsevier fixes them, you get the added benefit that readers who are not subscribed to Elsevier journals can read and cite your work. :)

Answer 4

The typical typesetting process, at least in my experience with Elsevier journals, is that the whole article will be re-typed from scratch. Large publishers usually use commercial typesetting software (i.e. not LateX) that are more appropriate for large scale publishing and match all the other steps in the production process.

You might have strong opinions about the cosmetics of your paper, but by submitting your work to a journal you need to accept that they have their own design and typesetting standards.

If errors effectively affect the meaning, then contacting the editor is the best course of action. The production team does not have the scientific background to understand what you wrote.

Answer 5

From your comments:

It is a big understatement when I say typesetting problems. They don't understand alphabets have different glyphs, and that figure size in the paper is not the same as the BB sizes (I was using LaTeX), and they don't know how to make a table with cell shadings (not for cosmetic purpose, but for highlighting some entries). They don't know how to typeset a multi-line equation correctly.

Elsevier provides some really good support for LaTeX users. The elsarticle class is pretty nice and they have some good documentation. While they allow any package in TeXLive and custom user macros, their instructions say:

• Use the standard layout or keep layout changes to a minimum. (Custom layout will be removed.)

• Keep it simple. (Advanced constructions with for example TikZ or pstricks will be rendered as images.)

Looking at what seem to be your issues

They don't understand alphabets have different glyphs

Fonts in LaTeX are a pain. Not every "font" supplies every glyph in every typeface. If you are using a font like Computer Modern or Latin Modern, you should hopefully be okay. As you do more advanced things (and changing the font is "more advanced") you violate the keep it simple instruction. Ideally, only use fonts/glyphs that you have either seen in other articles in that journal or are explicitly mentioned in the author instructions. If the journal has done it before, tell/show the editor the example. If it is something you have not seen before tell the editor something along the lines of it appears that in your system these two glyphs [tell them the glyphs] do not look that different, what can we do to make it easier for the reader.

figure size in the paper is not the same as the BB sizes

The instructions are clear about how wide the columns are in the journal layout. Bounding boxes are a real pain and not every program outputs images with reasonable bounding boxes. Ideally your bounding box should be tight to the figure content and exactly the same size as the column width. If your bounding box is not the same size as the column width and/or tight to the figure content, the editor/typesetter needs to make a choice. Again politely explaining why the image needs to be exactly the desired size (although it is not clear to me why this would be true), would be helpful.

they don't know how to make a table with cell shadings (not for cosmetic purpose, but for highlighting some entries).

Shaded cells in tables definitely violates the keep it simple instruction. Most style guides I have seen use footnotes in cells to highlight them. This obviously changes the content of the article. You should make sure that elements of your table match things that you have seen in other articles in the journal.

They don't know how to typeset a multi-line equation correctly.

They have some rules, but breaking equations is difficult. Since you know the column width, you can/should put the line breaks in manually.