Our ability to offer a cost-effective science editing service that is of the highest quality (and comes with a full quality guarantee) is attributable to several factors:

1. Some editing companies employ editors who are competent native English speakers, but whose qualifications are in English or other disciplines that are not related to science. Such editors are certainly able to improve the use of English in a scientific document, but their lack of expert science knowledge might result in errors in how the scientific content is presented. In contrast, the scientific expertise of our editors ensures that they understand the technical content of each document that they work on. Furthermore, their refereeing and copy-editing experience means that they are expert at communicating your scientific work to referees and journal editors using clear and correct English. One objective measure of the overall performance of any service is the client retention rate: at English Science Editing, more than 95% of our workload is from existing clients. We have clients in more than 40 countries, distributed approximately as follows: South Korea, 50%; China, 20%; Europe, 10%; Taiwan, 10%; and other countries, 10%.

2. Another objective indication of the high quality of our service is that the manuscripts we have edited have been published in more than 400 different journals.

3. English Science Editing is based in New Zealand, where our managing editor (a former senior British academic) emigrated to set up the company. Since the cost of living in New Zealand is lower than that in most other industrialized countries (e.g., the USA, the UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia), our operating costs – and hence our prices – are lower than those of comparable high-quality editing services that are based in these other countries.

4. Unlike many other editing companies, we never employ freelancers; there are three reasons why we consider this to be a huge benefit to our clients:

   1. The freelancers who work for other companies will inevitably be receiving a relatively small proportion of the amount that you pay to have your documents edited. This is especially true for those editing companies that appear to have numerous people involved in marketing, establishing collaborations with publishing companies, and managing the editing process. This will be reflected in the quality of editing that you receive, both in terms of the qualifications and experience of the editors, and their motivation and enthusiasm when they are editing your documents. Freelance editors are often motivated to simply "get through" as many documents as they can in as short a time as possible in order to improve their remuneration. As long-term employees, our editors at English Science Editing will be highly focused on maintaining the quality of their work.

   2. Our prices reflect the "spot price" of the availability of our very small number of highly qualified editors, rather than the averaged rate that applies to a large pool of independent freelancers (as may be the case when you send your documents to other editing companies).

   3. We are better able to guarantee the privacy of your document.

5. Unless an editor has had a significant amount of experience performing his or her own scientific research (as evidenced by the possession of tertiary qualifications such as a PhD and a long history of postdoctoral research experience), it is highly unlikely that he/she will have the expert knowledge necessary to fully understand and appreciate the scientific content of your document. It is not sufficient to simply be "good at English". This is why at English Science Editing we only employ editors with such experience and knowledge. We believe this ensures that the final edited document will reach the standard expected of a native-English-speaking expert scientist.

6. We operate a transparent pricing policy, in that all of our clients pay the same, advertised amounts for our services. Therefore, clients need not be concerned that they might be missing out on a special price deal that another client is enjoying.

7. Our ability to accept credit card payments is due to our status as a merchant with a bank, which offers several significant advantages over editing companies whose merchant facilities are provided via one of the various third parties that now operate on the Internet (e.g., WorldPay and PayPal):

1. The commission rates of a bank are significantly lower, and we share this saving with our clients.

2. Banks operate stricter approval processes for opening merchant accounts (which include verification of the physical address of a company and personally meeting the company owners), so you can be confident that you are dealing with a legitimate company.

3. Payments using Visa and MasterCard arrive in our bank account within 24 hours, whereas this can take several days or even weeks with third-party services; the associated savings in interest payments are also shared with our clients.