All documents edited by English Science Editing come with the following money-back quality guarantee, which ensures that clients are fully protected against documents being rejected for publication because of poor English:

The history behind our guarantee

When English Science Editing was formed in 2000, we implemented a policy of not asking clients for payment until after they had received edited documents. This was because we felt that it would be unreasonable to ask clients (especially new ones) to pay for our service before they had seen the quality of our work. In October 2004 we decided to further improve our customer service, by implementing the money-back quality guarantee. Any company offering such a guarantee is exposing itself to an element of financial risk; however, the high quality of our work means that this guarantee will need to be enacted only very rarely. Moreover, since our formation in 2000 we have not had a single instance of a client refusing to pay for our service.

The fine print

This guarantee only covers a document that has been edited in its entirety by English Science Editing, and where no significant changes have been made to the document between being returned to you, the ESE client, after editing and being submitted for publication. It is also the responsibility of the client to ensure that a document is free from plagiarism. If an ESE-edited document is rejected for publication because of poor English, and you wish to invoke our guarantee, we will ask you to provide us with (1) the exact version of the document submitted for publication, (2) a full description of how this differs from the document we returned to you, and (3) all correspondence that you have had with the journal editor/publisher, including letters, referee reports, and referee rebuttals. We will then implement the following procedure:

1. We will read the rejected document to check the quality of the English. If we agree that the English quality is lower than that expected of a document written by an expert native speaker, we will re-edit the document and return it to you for resubmission free of charge.

2. If we consider that the quality of English is acceptable we will, on your behalf, contact the journal editor who rejected your document to ascertain the full reasons for the rejection (if these were not obvious from the supporting documentation that you have sent us). Our reason for contacting the editor is that occasionally editors and referees use poor English as an excuse for rejecting a paper when some other underlying reason is present, but which (for some reason) they did not wish to communicate this to the author. Moreover, we ask for all the supporting documentation since the editor's decision can be influenced by the language used in an author's covering letters and responses to referees (perhaps, incorrectly, extrapolating them to the document itself). We therefore strongly recommend that the use of English is also checked in such supporting documents prior to submission.

3. If the rejection is due purely to the use of English (and not to the scientific content of the document), then we will work with you and the editor to ensure that the document is accepted for publication. In the very unlikely event that we are unable to satisfy the editor that the quality of English is acceptable, we will refund in full the amount you have paid for our editing of the document.