§ 06 — About
Edmacro started in 2019, when a journal copyeditor and a VBA developer spent a weekend automating the worst hour of her day: reconciling a 240-entry reference list against Vancouver style. The macro worked. The next Monday, three colleagues asked for it.
Seven years and 12,400 manuscripts later, the idea hasn’t changed: mechanical errors should be caught by machines, so human judgment can go where machines fail. Every manuscript we return carries both signatures — the macro log and the editor’s.
48 hours is our standard, not our ceiling. When a manuscript needs more, we say so first.
No routine ships an edit unreviewed. Every flag is ruled on by a person with a name.
Tracked changes, query memos, macro logs. Nothing silent, nothing unexplained.
The organisation
Eight units, arranged around the work rather than around an org chart. A job arrives at the Client Desk, passes through Pipeline & Integrations for the macro sweep, sits with the Editorial Desk for the human edit, and leaves the way it came in — with a log of everything that happened to it. The other four exist to keep those first four honest: the standards they apply, the tools they run, the software half of the work, and the line none of them may cross.
The largest unit, and the one every manuscript ends up in. Editors are grouped by field rather than by client, so the person reading your methods section has read a hundred like it. The desk rules on every flag the macros raise — accept, reject, or query — and nothing leaves the building without a name attached to that judgment.
Owns
The house authority on citation style. When a journal’s published guide and its actual back matter disagree — and they disagree more often than anyone admits — this unit decides which one we follow, writes the decision down, and that decision binds every editor after it. No style sheet enters the library without being read here first.
Owns
Sixty-one routines that editors bet their names on. Every macro begins as a specification written by an editor, ships with before-and-after fixtures, and carries a changelog written to be read rather than filed. Nothing here is clever at the cost of being predictable.
Owns
The layer a manuscript rides through before a human sees it. Reference lists are checked against Crossref and PubMed entry by entry, callouts and numbering are verified, and publishers working through a backlog are processed in batches with a report at every stage. Failures here are loud by design — a silent skip is worse than a flagged error.
Owns
The unit that sits in both halves of the company. It edits research software the way the desk edits prose — docstrings, comments, READMEs, API references, notebook narrative — and it does not touch what the code does. The test it works to is simple: can a stranger clone the repository and arrive at the same numbers?
Owns
Everything the company knows, taught outward. Cohorts run for journals, labs, and freelance editors across US and EU hours, covering the macro library, the checklists, and — the part that takes longest — when to overrule both. Teams leave with a style sheet built with them, not handed to them.
Owns
Where a manuscript enters and leaves. This unit scopes the work, returns an estimate within one business day, schedules against the 48-hour clock, and remains the single named contact until the last round of follow-up is closed. When a manuscript needs longer than the standard, you hear it here, and you hear it first.
Owns
Less a department than a standing brief, staffed from the other units. It owns the line the whole company is built on — editing is never authorship — and reviews every new service, macro, and training module against it before launch. It also holds the unglamorous, load-bearing things: NDAs, embargoes, and how a file is handled once it reaches us.
Owns
Nobody stays inside one unit for long. Editors file macro requests and see their names in the changelog; engineers sit in on cohorts to watch their tools meet real manuscripts; the compliance brief is staffed from the desk itself, by the people whose judgment it constrains. The structure is there to make ownership obvious, not to keep anyone in a lane.
The desk
Co-founder · Managing Editor
Co-founder · Head of Macros
Senior Copyeditor · STM
Training Lead