June 16, 2025

Document freeze in academic publishing

Scholarly publication is seldom explained in the literature. There are only vaque information available about peer review which has to do with submitting the document to a third party. A more technical oriented document workflow is oriented on freezing a paper which should be explained briefly.
Similar to a code freeze in software engineering, a document freeze means to stop any edits in the document. The only allowed activities after a document freeze are:
- proofreading
- layout formatting, e.g. change the fontsize and rearrange the figures
- peer review
It depends on the concrete pipeline how much effort is put into proofreading and peer review. Fixing all the typo error including the grammar mistakes can be a time consuming activity. And reformulating the content in response to peer critiques might also be a demanding challenge. Nevertheless, most academic papers have a freeze period in which some of these activities are realized in the hope to improve the quality of the final document.
Freezing a document means simply that it remains unchanged for a longer time period which are weeks upto months. During this period, the content gets outdated automatically. Peer review is only a fraction of the overall freeze process.

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