After your article has been submitted ...

As editor of JIPLP, I often receive emails from contributors with regard to the progress of their articles.  To this end, I've prepared the following post, which explains some of the points that crop up from time to time.

Do not be surprised if, having been received a warm note to the effect that your article has been accepted, you simply don't recognise it when you see the proof version. This will have been edited and very often a large number of changes will have been made to it. Some are to make your text conforms to house style, which authors in an ideal world would do before they submit their contributions in the first place, but busy IP portfolio managers, highly-skilled practitioners, perceptive academics and seasoned administrators will respond with a chorus of "we are IP experts, not copy editors -- if we write the article, you have to turn it into shape". We do.

On the subject of house-style, we try to keep quotes in their original form for the sake of authenticity. This means that the same word may appear in two different forms in successive sentences.

Often, changes are made in order to make the article read well: shortening sentences, eliminating repetitions of words, turning clumsy passives into elegant actives, and so on. Titles are frequently trimmed. Since titles appear in larger letters than does the text of an article, a 27-word title can end up almost half way down the page, which is why we prune it.  Footnotes are often radically altered, particularly if they contain text which should appear in the body of the article.

On receipt of the proof you will be required to confirm which part of your name is your surname. It does seem strange for someone with a name like "John Smith" to be asked to confirm that "Smith" is his surname, but some cases are more complex. Many Asian names cause problems, and European names too: Spaniards are blessed with more names than are many other nationalities, Hungarians like to invert their names and many Britons have double- or even triple-barrelled surnames which they extend or shorten for their own purposes and which can make their works difficult to locate in databases using "find-by-surname" criteria.

It is now possible to make corrections and amendments to your proofs, even though they are Adobe pdf files. Editing Adobe documents on-screen is 'clunky' in comparison with regular word-processing programs, but the principle is the same and each proof is prefaced with a sheet containing simple instructions.

Further production notes will be posted from time to time, dealing with other issues raised by readers.