Elsevier Spams Journal Contributors With Offer Of Language Revision

suggest in said spam that they may need some help to get into print?

For a suggestion of this nature to come from a journal publisher smacks of payola, above and beyond the usual issues with page charges and such. If you want to portray yourself as a reputable scientific publisher, as I assume Elsevier wants to do, this is an epic marketing fail.

I haven't seen this particular e-mail (that I know of; it may have gone straight into my spam filter), so they may be assuming that people in countries where English is not the official language need this help, but people in English-speaking countries don't. That's a bad assumption on both counts: some native English speakers work in countries with other native languages (in addition to locals who become fluent in English), while many scholars who are not fluent in English work in English-speaking countries (most often the US, but also the UK, Canada, and Australia).

My guess is that they've spammed everybody they've sent a rejection letter. Not a good call either.

Note that in many branches of science, there is a boycott of Elsevier, due to their highly inflated prices. That alone should be a reason not to do business with them.

By the way, do you recognize where the photo in my avatar was taken? Not exactly archeology, but a site of historical importance.

I know about the boycott but my co-author likes the journal. That statue looks like Tycho Brahe, so my guess is the island of Hven!

Also, it ought to be "written *to* the highest standard of English", or "in the most elegant English" or something similar, not a nasty combination of the two that sounds - to my ears - non-native!

The time has come (and was reached some while ago) for engineering journals and the proceedings of engineering conferences to be published online, open access. There is almost no money in publishing them anyway, and it is clearly in everyone's interest to do it. Unfortunately, there is no sign of it happening.

Suggested amendments forwarded by email, Captain Rundkvist.

Yeah, to the highest standard, not in the highest standard.

it is clearly in everyone’s interest to do it

It is not in the publishers' interest to do it. Under the status quo, they're basically getting money for nothing. If I were a publishing company that had that kind of deal going, I'd want to keep it going, too.

That's a big part of why journals and books on technical subjects are so #$(@*%( expensive. They can't make it up on volume, so they have to charge high prices for the work. There is a reason Donald Knuth used dollar signs to indicate switches between math mode and text mode in TeX: mathematical typesetting has historically been especially expensive.

"Money for nothing"? That depends. While some academic presses have been bought by by rent-seekers who provide few services and squeeze money out of academic libraries, others are shoestring operations run by volunteers grappling with the need to earn their $10,000 cash costs on a print run of 200 copies. Producing a book is expensive: turning a novel MS into something which is ready for mass printing costs about 20 person-weeks ( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-ar… ). I have seen estimates that the cost to produce scholarly articles is on the order of 10 dollars/pounds/euros per reading, and that money has to come from somewhere too (as Stross points out, digital publishing lets the publishers save 10% or so not 50%).

Making the author pay costs of publication is a stopgap, but it has its own problems.

Speaking of translations, am I the only one to be infuriated by crappy translations in science documentaries? I can understand kitsch channels have the cheapest translators money can buy, but *science* documentaries?
(OT) Time-Lapse: Swedish Sunset http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/06/15/time_lapse_video_of…

Archaeologists find Baldrick's trousers! http://phys.org/news/2014-06-year-trousers-chinese-grave-oldest.html

@Birger - no, you aren't the only one infuriated by crappy translations; I can never understand why anyone would pay lots of money to produce their product/website/film and then quibble at a few extra quid to get across the message in another language! It's an awful false economy.

Jane, welcome back!
(OT) Data mining: Old Bailey data shows growing intolerance for violence during Victorian era http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25728-old-bailey-data-shows-growi…

@12 "Chinese grave" is potentially misleading - the trousers belonged to horse-riding nomads from Western Eurasia who had migrated to the Tarim Basin. The grave is only Chinese in the sense that its location is now in Xinjiang Province.