What sort of editing is supposed to be happening here on the forum? Mostly content editing, or are we also supposed to be doing proofreading?

[I vote for content and criticism only]

As noted in the Citation-Handling sticky thread, John's recent draft uses a different citation format than the sticky requires. I assumed that the forum was not the place to point this out. If it became my job to be the proofreader for his MS, I'd simply fix that, or demand that he do so, and send it to him privately.

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Which raises another ugly question that's looming on the horizon.

In academic journals with which I'm familiar, the final editing and proofreading process, where somebody sits down with a blue pen and fixes things, is usually done in two parts, of which you hope the second is a no-brainer.

1. Make all requisite editorial changes, including fixing typos, formats, and so on. If there are a huge number of such things, you should have told the author to fix it a while back. These changes are simply entered; no authorial comment is solicited.

2. You send a final proof (in our case a laid-out PDF) to the author for checking. At this time the author is only supposed to correct typos and the like, i.e. things the proofreader missed. A few very small changes may be made; altering more than about one full longish sentence in proof is considered bad form, and the editor will be very nasty about it, possibly asking the author for money to do the corrections (which after all are the author's fault). Several journals which I have published in send you proofs and say that you have 3 days from receipt to make any corrections and send it back; if you don't do so, they will print it as is.

The problem is that I find a lot of people, including some academics, get very shirty about people making corrections of any kind, and think that it should all be done in redline, with the author then making the corrections as he sees fit, and so on.

Now I am against this, myself. To return to the example of John's paper (not to single him out, but because it's recent), if I were assigned to be the proofreader/editor on this, I would silently make all the corrections I thought required by our formatting and so on, as well as fixing any of what I was very sure were typos. If there were larger questions, things that I did think he needed input on, I would simply send him the revised copy with full-cap bracketed insertions {DO YOU MEAN MECHANICAL OR SYSTEMATIC? APPEARS TO DISAGREE WITH DEFINITIONS ABOVE}. But I wouldn't even mention the other corrections. Assuming I had no such editorial confusions, I would then send the corrected copy to Jonathan, who would lay it out, and then would presumably send final laid-out copy to John.

This would, of course, be the first time John knew anything about my changing his bibliographies and annotations.

The disadvantage of doing it the other way is that it is SLOOOW. The disadvantage of doing it this way is that John may be unpleasantly surprised.

So what do you think? And let me know if anything here isn't clear, as well; if we're going to work out editorial procedure I need to be sure everyone is on the same page about the options. Note also that I've only mentioned a few parts of the process; there are others that may need to get worked out as well.

Changing typos and revising citation style without the author's participation sounds fine to me. I'm all for your method of doing things, actually. If people have issues, there are places along the way (when they get the proof {if there are issues}, when the layout proof comes in) where they can make their opinion known.