Sir

During the past two years, most of the leading scientific journals have switched to an electronic system for manuscript submission.

Superficially, this might seem to be progress. But in practice, the onus for the preparation of publication-quality manuscripts, particularly figures, has quietly switched from the journals to the authors, who are now expected to run mini-desktop publishing operations from their offices and laboratories.

The submission of a paper can now take days of fiddling with various computer programs, where once it took a few minutes to print a manuscript and shove it in an envelope. The end-product is no better, nor is publication any quicker, and page charges (for those journals operating that system) are as high as ever.

So just who has benefited, or profited, from the change? The authors or the journals? And how do scientists in less-developed countries with older computer systems cope with the quixotic demands of the electronic systems?

The degree of user-unfriendliness varies from journal to journal (Nature's is far from the worst), but avoiding the most hassle-associated systems is now, in my case at least, a significant factor to be taken into account when choosing a journal for submission of a paper.