Submitting manuscripts online

So, I submitted a paper the other day, which was all accomplished with the internets. It was through the Manuscript Central web service, which i’m sure many of you have used. Their service hosts some 1,700 books and journals, which seems fairly ubiquitous.

Anyway…my overall experience was pretty good. Online submission has improved by leaps and bounds in just the last couple of years. This service is pretty slick….it integrates your main text document and all your figures and tables into a single PDF that is ready for download by your peers for review. It would be nice to have that capability when I’m preparing drafts of papers for co-authors and such. Obviously, it’s not that difficult to prepare an integrated PDF these days, but still….to have one magical button that does it for you would provide more time for more important things.

But….I did have one problem. The figure upload feature tells you to paste your captions into a dialog box and they will automatically be associated with the figure and placed on a page preceding that figure in the final PDF. It didn’t work. So, I had to be that guy who emails the editors and tell them something went wrong and my submission is incomplete. I hate being that guy.

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