Journals that Accept TeX/LaTeX submissions

Introduction

[I'm especially grateful to Christina Thiele, Guido Milanese, Ron Arstein, and Robert Felty for advice about this page].

I thought it would be a good idea to list academic journals that accept papers in TeX/LaTeX form. Of course, this turns out not to be as simple a question as it first appears.

First, there is the TeX/LaTeX issue -- conceivably some journals might accept one but not the other. This is probably not a big issue because conversion between them is a relatively small matter.

The more difficult issue is what it means to `accept', and at what stage. Typically, when an author submits an article to a journal, the journal sends it to editors and reviewers for comment.At this stage, all anybody wants is something they can read without too much trouble, so probably any of the standard portable document formats (e.g. pdf) is the best thing. Its unreasonable to expect a journal or a reviewer to hassle with TeX/LaTeX at this stage. If the reviews are favourable, the article will be accepted for publication, normally subject to some corrections/changes. The author makes these changes and is then ready to submit `properly'. This is when things get interesting, because this is the stage at which electronic submission of a TeX/LaTeX source may be sensible and attractive to the author. A journal which says it `accepts' TeX/LaTeX submission at this stage might mean several things:

You can send us TeX/LaTeX source if you insist, but it has to conform to our house style, which is set up for very old fashioned typesetting. E.g. you must supply us with figures on a separate sheet, and put `insert figure XX around here' at the appropriate place in the text. Or they require some baroque system of formats for section headings. You (the author) end up using TeX/LaTeX as a glorified typewriter.

Okay, if you insist on sending us some TeX/LaTeX, we'll try to deal with it, but what we will probably do is get someone to re-type most of it, with inevitable mistakes, in (say) Word. Sometimes they won't even use the TeX/LaTeX for this, but will copy and paste stuff from the pdf file that you also sent them to show how things should look. This may be marginally better than insisting that you do the conversion to Word (or whatever) yourself, but it is not going to help much, especially if you have to make further changes -- if you want to make these changes yourself, you are going to have get a copy of the Word document from the journal and wrestle with that (imagine the change involves inserting an extra example, hence re-numbering all following examples).

We don't really use TeX/LaTeX in-house, but we are happy to receive it - we mess about with it in various ways, but not in ways that impact on you the author; e.g. if you have to add something you can send us some TeX/LaTeX code.

We use TeX/LaTeX in-house, We will take your TeX/LaTeX file, pretty much as it is, and do our best with it.

We use TeX/LaTeX in-house, and we have public class/style files for authors which you can/should use.

There may even be journals that require TeX/LaTeX submission (or plain ascii).

Recently, I have come across yet another attitude. This manifests itself as welcoming TeX/LaTeX submission, and claiming to use it (even insisting on authors using the Journal's house style), but when the proofs are returned, it is clear from the number and variety of typos and other mistakes that have been introduced that something very strange has gone on with the submission. In fact, what has happened is consistent with the submission having been re-typed. Why would a journal do this? Perhaps because the re-typing is cheap, and the only person who suffers is the author, who has to correct all these errors.

There is probably nothing the individual author can do about this, apart from complaining loudly to the journal's editors (and perhaps `naming and shaming' via the LingTeX mailing list: ling-tex@ifi.uio.no. I mention it here only as a general warning. So far as I know, none of the journals actually named below as `friendly' has ever indulged in this sort of thing.

If you think I am being snide or snooty about journals here, you may be right. But this is not because I underestimate the problems they can have dealing with arbitrary TeX/LaTeX files - especially with individual authors' style files and macros. As one editor puts it:

"...you can end up with examples of TeX use that range from newbies sticking in \\ at the end of every paragraph to super-excessive experts who've re-written and re-defined just about every macro in LaTeX..."

So, here are three lists of journals. Those which are known to be `TeX/LaTeX friendly', those which are `neutral', and those which are `unfriendly'. Inclusion in either list is based on personal recommendations/comments I receive (so it is in principle possible for a journal to be in more than one list!). Please let me know if you have comments. Comments could also be sent to the LingTeX mailing list: ling-tex@ifi.uio.no

I'm not generally going to bother giving URLs or web links here -- any decent search engine will bring them up very quickly.

TeX/LaTeX Friendly

TeX/LaTeX Neutral

TeX/LaTeX Un-Friendly

I have no personal experience, but Robert Felty states that most journals published by Oxford and Blackwell seem to strongly discourage LaTeX submissions.

Introduction

TeX/LaTeX Friendly

TeX/LaTeX Neutral

TeX/LaTeX Un-Friendly

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