Pre-submission proofreading is a common practice. Especially in books you will find acknowledgements to colleagues, friends and relatives, e.g. "for useful remarks after reading a preliminary version". It is also a business, i.e. you will find freelance persons and companies offering proofreading services for money - I already received advertising email messages from such companies. Usually they offer their service to improve spelling, grammar and style. To improve the scientific content, only scientists from the same field can help, i.e. colleagues.

Hi Johannes Gruenwald . I think question can be answered by two ways :

a. If you consider yourself as an examiner for the paper ( referee for the journal ), then the examiner should not give any information for the student during the examination. This is illegal. But,

b. If you consider yourself as adviser for the authors , then can be consider as a help .

So look to yourself : are you examiner or advisor? Thank you

It has already done by many authors.

Thanks for all the answers so far - meant rather to check for language and scientific soundness, of course, without being involved in the peer-review process afterwards (as this would be highly questionable).

A reviewer is not an examinator and suggestions to improve the manuscript are always welcome. Journals have a problem to find a reviewer, so just be a reviewer and do not waist your energy for nothing.

Dear Johannes,

thank you for initiating this interesting discussion on RG. In principle this sounds like a very good idea. However, in my personal opinion the suitability depends on the field of research and the age / experience of the authors. Pre-submission proof reading of scientific manuscripts could be very helpful for young / unexperienced authors particularly in humanities. In our field of research, chemistry, the language we use is rather specialized and difficult to read for non-experts. I assume that complicated chemical names like hexakis(cyclohexyl)cylosilsesquioxane are somewhat difficult to read and correct for non-chemists. By the way: In my personal opinion, proofreading of theses and manuscripts written by students shoud be the duty of the supervisor.

Good luck with your work and best wishes!

Johannes Gruenwald, I think it's an excellent idea to have at least one other person read through an article before it is submitted to a journal. I read a lot of articles and wonder why somebody didn't knock the use of language into shape before publication. Obviously, many journals don't employ good proofreaders, or any proofreaders at all, so much comes back to the quality of the authors' submissions.

I have a small group of "trusted readers" who fortunately enjoy reading the kind of articles that I write, and I wouldn't think of submitting an article to a journal without at least one of them reading what I'd written. They almost always provide helpful feedback, even if it is only in relation to a sentence that might have been structured a little more effectively. They also pick up goofy mistakes on my part. I always ask them if they'd like to be mentioned in the acknowledgements section of the article. Some say yes, some no - and I run with their wishes.

Incidentally, I edit a lot of postgraduate theses and am no longer surprised by the obviously poor language skills that many supervisors must have if they are supposed to help their students to write well.

I always have multiple readers review my work before submission. Even those without content expertise tend to find things worthy of correction.

The English language bias makes it such that non-native speakers of English have a disadvantage if they submit to English-language journals without getting someone highly proficient in English to proof their work prior to submission. Johannes Gruenwald It is not an even playing field for non-native speakers.

Since there are provisions for Comments to the author and to the Editor, one makes suggestions to both. I believe that's the purpose of good peer reviewing. The paper then stands the test of time and remains relevant. People, students or whoever, could then refer back to it so many benefit.

Your point is acceptable.

Obianuju P. Umeji

I think it is a good option to provide such services for authors where English is not the first language (Latin America, Eastern Europe, etc). But I am not sure how many authors can be willing to share their research with independent referees unless they are affiliated with any journals.

Yes, but not always the same.

The problems with the publications are on two levels, the linguistic and the technical. With linguistic proofreading, I often see the problem that I have to give the translator at least 30 technical terms so that it is also sensible. But maybe translating would no longer be a problem if you limited yourself to short and clear sentences.

To my astonishment, however, I find more and more errors or inadequacies in the scientific fundamentals. These errors are often not recognized by the reviewers, whatever the reason.

As a small episode I would like to name what happened to me about 20 years ago, but it is very characteristic.

I gave a talk at a conference in Melbourne for which I was praised by all the professionals present. The conference organizer therefore wanted it to be published as a magazine article in the UK. After another thorough revision and submission, I received the following three reviews:

1. Very excellent, can be submitted without revision

2. Five wishes for inadequate explanation or better English explanation, but can be published with small corrections.

3. Very bad English. You don't understand what is meant, rejected. Without going into direct sections.

What do you think of such reviewers, I just think No.2 did its job really right.

It must also be said that the submitted text was proofread by an English-speaking colleague with a high level of specialist knowledge.

H.-P. Schulze : Thanks for this input - I know the situation from both ends, as a reviewer and as an author. It is sometimes really frustrating. Just to give an impression about the other side of the medal: As a reviewer I often had the frustrating experience that when I recommended a rejection (which I do not do lightheartedly), I went through the trouble of several pages of explanations, even with calculations and citations to show that the paper is not good enough or even erroneous but this got then overruled by the editor because another referee just wrote 'nice paper, publish as it is'.

This happened on several occations for different journals and makes me wonder what the merrit is to put in a lot of time for a report, which is just ignored because somebody else writes one standard sentence, which does not even proof that he or she even read the manuscript...

Dear Johannes Gruenwald , yes, I think so.

For the candidates, the supervisor/director is responsible to correct the grammar and technical error before submission.

However, for some professors, the proof reading may be needed.

Yes, that is the best practice so that some typos, grammatical and even logical errors can be identified and corrected.

Used FIVERR several times for the papers of my students — typically USD 50 for 5.000 words including science check. As I will not accept any papers internally anymore that have their language and grammar reviewed beforehand the answer is a clear YES. Wish everyone would do it then my work and enjoyment as reviewer would be greatly increased.

Personally I would never give my paper for the technical review to someone outside of my group (unless it is my former advisor). These days, some people duplicate already published papers without even citing them. Or reproduce their colleagues' conference talk while the paper is still in preparation. Now imagine if these people get your unpublished work. We have so many journals that even the experts in some very narrow field can't follows all the papers in this field.

There is also big problem with the quality of editors/reviewers. Some of them accept these positions only for the sake of prestige in the academic community, not to provide better service. In my opinion, some of the editors (at least, in the journals where I publish my papers) have double standards. Many of the reviewers also are unprofessional. Personally I never review the papers, if I see the conflict of interests. If I feel that I can't provide the fair review, I just decline the reviewer position. Unfortunately, what I see is that some people accept the reviewer position only in order to reject the paper from their "competitor" or somebody who criticizes their work. They aren't even try to read and understand the paper which they're supposed to evaluate fairly.

Agree with H.-P. Schulze