My post yesterday highlighted the high cost of re-formatting papers for submission to academic journals, with a total cost estimated at US$1.1 billion per year. I was reflecting on this today, and perhaps there is a reason for this high cost, aside from each journal's publishers wanting to maintain a particular style that distinguishes the journal from other journals.
Perhaps the time cost of formatting (and re-formatting) is a way of dealing with asymmetric information, specifically adverse selection. At the time of submission (i.e. before peer review, and before the editor has even read the abstract), the quality of a paper submitted to a journal is known to the authors (presumably), but not to the publisher. The quality is therefore private information. Since the publisher doesn't know whether any particular article submission is high quality or not, their best option (aside from editorial and peer review, which I will come to in a moment) is to assume that every submission is low quality. This is a pooling equilibrium - all article submissions are pooled together as if they are the same quality. The publisher may as well pick randomly from this pool of submissions of unknown quality, leading to a journal that gains a reputation for low quality articles (this is basically the business model of some publishers that offer 'pay-to-publish'). Authors with high quality articles would avoid those journals, lowering the quality of the article submissions further. Eventually, only the lowest quality articles get submitted, and published. This is a problem of adverse selection, because authors want their high quality articles to be published, but in the end, only low quality articles get published.
The way to solve an adverse selection problem is to reveal the private information - in this case, to identify which article submissions are high quality, and which are low quality. That would lead to a separating equilibrium, where low quality articles are rejected and high quality articles are accepted and published. The publisher can reveal this information through editorial and peer review. The editor reads the abstract (and perhaps the paper), and decides whether it is worthwhile sending for review, and if not the submission is desk-rejected. If the paper is sent out for peer review, its quality is judged by the peer reviewers. These processes are a form of screening - where the uninformed party (the publisher) tries to reveal the private information (about the quality of the article submission).
However, screening is not the only way to deal with an adverse selection problem. And the problem with screening through editorial and peer review is that it takes up a lot of time. The editor has to spend time reading and making decisions, and the peer reviewers have to spend time reading and writing reports. The alternative to screening is signalling - where the informed party (the authors) reveal the private information themselves.
Now, of course, if you simply ask the authors whether their paper is high quality or not, every author (even those with low quality articles) would respond that their paper is high quality. In order for a signal to credibly reveal the private information and be effective, it needs to meet two important conditions: (1) it needs to be costly; and (2) it needs to be more costly in a way that makes it unattractive for those with the low quality attributes to attempt. One way that signals could meet the second condition is if they are more costly to the authors of low quality articles.
By having idiosyncratic formatting requirements, it is clear that submitting to a journal is costly, so it meets the first condition. What about the second condition? I can see two ways that we could argue that costly re-formatting is more costly for authors of low-quality articles than for authors of high-quality articles.
First, authors of low-quality articles will realise that their submission has a lower chance of acceptance than a high-quality article does. That means that they can anticipate having to go through the re-formatting and submission process more than once, leading to a higher cost. To avoid this higher cost, they may avoid submitting to high quality journals (thereby revealing that their paper is low quality). Authors of high-quality articles know their submission is high quality and has a higher chance of being accepted, so they know they face a lower cost of re-formatting, and will be more likely to submit to a high-quality journal.
Second, authors of high-quality articles are more likely to be high-quality academics, who are well supported by their institutions, have research grants, and may have research assistants who can handle the re-formatting at relatively low (salary, or monetary) cost. Authors of low-quality articles are less likely to have this support, and have to handle the re-formatting themselves, at (presumably) higher salary (or monetary) cost.
So, perhaps the high cost of re-formatting journal articles for submission to journals is a signalling mechanism that acts as a way of sifting out the low-quality journal submissions before they start tying up editor (and peer reviewer) time? Would moving to a system where the authors can submit in any sensible format for the initial submission actually be an improvement, or would it tie up more resources in unnecessary editorial and peer review? It would be interesting to see some analysis of the experience of journals that have adopted a more open formatting approach for first submission, in terms of the quality of submissions (and the quality of published articles).
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