(8 Jun 2023) For scientists submitting their papers to journals, there’s an all-too-familiar drill: spend hours formatting the paper to meet the journal’s guidelines; if the paper is rejected, sink more time into reformatting it for another journal; repeat.
Now an analysis has put a price tag on all that busy work: US$230 million worth of time was wasted by scientists worldwide reformatting papers sent to biomedical journals in 2021 alone1. Appalled by that exorbitant cost, the authors of the analysis, which was published in BMC Medicine on 10 May, propose that journals should allow free-format submissions so researchers can spend their time and money on research instead.
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