> They make you do all the writing, editing, formatting and figure design for free Shouldn't research scientists be the ones who write? I mean, who else knows

> They make you do all the writing, editing, formatting and figure design for free Shouldn't research scientists be the ones who write? I mean, who else knows the intimate details about your experiments that need to be communicated to posterity? And, do they really make you do the formatting? My understanding is you basically just give them an easily readable pdf version of your paper... in standard double spaced 12 font arial, and when it gets accepted they are the ones who choose the pretty fonts (probably with Indesign) and revise your figures so they don't look crappy. That said, I'll say one nice thing about the system (partly in the spirit of contrarianism, as hardly anyone has good things to say about top journals:)). If you really want to be published in a top journal, there are two routes: 1) make something really ground-breaking... and then you can even submit a crappily-formatted paper with ugly figures and you'll still get accepted -- and they'll make good figures for you! 2) have something decently good... make good figures, make sure you follow formatting guidelines to a tee and make everything as easy as possible for the editors, and then hope for the best. I think this situation is not too bad.