Journal typesetting and production is the work of turning an accepted research paper into the final article that readers see: correct in its language, and laid out for print and for the web. It is also called journal production or publishing services. Publishers around the world send much of this work to companies in India. The large publishers' own Indian centres, in cities such as Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai, do a large part of it too.
Production has four main steps. First comes copyediting. A copyeditor corrects grammar and spelling, and applies the journal's house style, such as how units, dates and abbreviations are written. The copyeditor also checks each reference, for instance that the year and the page numbers of a cited paper are correct. Second, the paper is converted into XML. XML is a text format in which every part of the paper is labelled: the title, each author, each figure and each reference. Most journals use one standard set of these labels, called JATS, the Journal Article Tag Suite. Third comes typesetting. Software builds the print-ready PDF and the web page from the same XML file, so the two versions always match. Fourth come the proofs. The author receives the laid-out article, marks any last corrections and returns it, often within 48 hours.
Consider a paper on battery materials, 7,000 words long, with 8 figures and 52 references. A chemistry journal has accepted it. Its publishing platform sends the paper to a production team in Chennai on a Monday. Software checks the 52 references against a database of published papers. It finds 4 references with wrong page numbers, and the copyeditor corrects them. On Thursday, the author receives the proof. She corrects one equation and approves the rest. The article is published online the next week, and its details are sent to the citation databases.
Why is so much of this work done in India? It needs large teams who read and write English well, and who are trained in the rules of each journal. India has such teams, at a lower cost. The production companies also build the software that manages the work. It tracks thousands of papers at once, converts files into XML and lays out pages automatically.
AI models now prepare a growing part of the copyediting. A model suggests the corrections, and a trained copyeditor accepts or rejects each one. This way of working is called human in the loop. The copyeditor's main duty is to keep the author's meaning. While a model smooths a sentence, it can also quietly change a scientific claim.
Production is different from an academic writing assistant. The assistant helps the author before the paper is submitted, and the author chooses and pays for it. Production starts only after the journal has accepted the paper, and the publisher pays for it.