How much time is usually left for authors to return page proofs? What happens if I am late? Recently I was handling submission of a paper to a journal. I was somewhat surprised that I was asked to return the corrections to galley proofs in 48 hours.


  To ensure fast publication of your paper please return your corrections within 48 hours. ...  Note that  may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.


How usual is it, that only a short period is left for the authors to return page proofs? Do many journals allow similar time span? Or is a longer period customary?

I can imagine situations in which I would not be able to respond in 48 hours.

What would happen if I reacted only later, not within the time period required by publisher (48 hours in this case)? Is it probable that they would still incorporate the corrections if I emailed a bit later? (Or if I emailed them that I am unable to complete this in 48 hours and explained the reasons.)
With Wiley, the journal I edit has a one-week period for returning proofs. This is set by Wiley and not by the journal. If proofs are not sent in, at some point within another week, the typesetter will typically ask for the proofs through a production editor. This is because the typesetter has the manuscript along with, I would guess, hundreds of other proofs lined up in a production line and at some point they do not want things lying around for very long. So in this case, not much happens if proofs are late and I have never seen any serious repercussions from the publisher's side affecting authors. In the worst case a paper that has been assigned to a specific issue may be moved to a later issue since the production of issues (physical printing) is not possible to adjust other than under exceptional conditions. In the end, it will the author's loss if the paper is not published as early as it could. Since for most papers, electronic publication occurs before printing, the delay just means the paper appears online later by the same amount of time or more; it can be bumped in the production line of the typesetter in favour of those that come in on time.

In my experience, it is not possible to get corrections done after returning the proof corrections. One can always try but if the paper has been corrected and published online, there is no other option than to live with the problem or if it is in some way critical, go through the journal editors to possibly publish an errata.