Oceanography Editing and Proofreading Services

A twenty-year-old profile turns out to be the only measurement anyone made at that position, and a new study needs it. The cruise report gives the station number and the date. It does not give the instrument, when it was last calibrated, whether the sensor was compared against bottle samples, or which of two ships' clocks the time came from — and so the profile can be plotted but not trusted.

We edit what oceanographers write — cruise reports and station documentation, physical and chemical oceanography papers, biological oceanography and plankton studies, moored and autonomous platform data reports, modelling and reanalysis work, data management plans and metadata records, technical manuals for instruments and processing, and theses, articles and proposals. Our editors work on the metadata that makes an observation reusable.

Ocean observations are expensive, sparse and frequently irreplaceable, and the failure is data documented well enough for the authors and not for anyone else. A measurement is only as good as the record of how it was made. We work through these so each station carries its position, time with the time zone or UTC offset stated, depth reference and the sounding, since a station reported without these cannot be matched to any other; so the instrument is identified by type and serial number with the date and method of its last calibration, because sensor drift is the normal condition and a calibration date is what lets a later user correct for it; so the comparison against reference samples is reported with the offsets found rather than described as "good agreement", given that the numbers are what a reanalysis needs; so processing is documented as steps with the version of any software and the flags applied, as quality flags mean nothing without their scheme; so gaps, failures and suspect data are recorded with what happened rather than removed silently; so units, conventions and the sign of any flux are stated explicitly; and so the archive deposit and its identifier are given. Reports written this way are still usable when the ship, the instrument and the people are all gone.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, cruise reports and material under embargo. We are editors rather than oceanographers, and we offer no view on instruments, calibration or data quality. What we can do is make the record complete enough to reuse.