Prior to submitting a paper to a science journal, many European scientists employ language professionals to check that the English is acceptable. What influences these language professionals' criteria of acceptability? How do they interact with the authors for whom they work? And how do journals' criteria of acceptability affect their work? In this paper, a language professional formerly based in the Netherlands considers these issues, giving examples of the editing approaches of several experienced colleagues. She argues that language planners could contribute to securing better guidance from science journals on matters linguistic and also to developing appropriate training for language professionals. (Contains 8 notes.)