Sounds like a job for AI!!      Would save everyone a lot of time, effort and angst if each journal had it's own private AI reviewer/editor that can take a paper and reformat it into the desired format.

Strict formatting demands before peer review often feel outdated, especially when journals later ask for different layouts post-acceptance anyway. Adopting a more relaxed approach early on makes sense.

It is bad enough that we allow commercial companies like Springer and Wiley to sell our own research back to us. But why do we suffer the format pedantry of editorial offices? That is not the publisher, it is the professional society.

Biometrics is one of the worst offenders here. I have never submitted a paper to them without them asking for modification. Here is their standard admonishment: “A list of keywords should be added following your abstract, the paper should be in a 12-point font, tables and figures should be placed at the end of the document, and the list of references should be double-spaced throughout at no more than 25 lines per page.”

Keywords excepted, none of the other stuff matters for a first submission. The unpaid reviewers certainly would not care! Journals should only worry about format when they offer a revision.

And whose idea was it to put Figures and Tables at the end of the paper? I recently reviewed a paper for Biometrics, and it was so annoying scrolling down to the end of the paper and back to the description 8 pages earlier. I ended up creating a copy and opening both so I could see the Figure and the description at the same time.

Sigh.