I find it pretty hard to fault these submissions in any way - journal publishers have been lining their own pockets at everyone's expense and these claims show pretty clearly that they aren't worth their cut.
May I ask two things? First, how much do you think a journal charges for publishing? Second, what work do you believe the publisher actually does?
Consider this: when you publish with a journal, they commit to hosting the article indefinitely—maintaining web servers, DOIs, references, back-references, and searchability.
Next, they employ editors—who are paid—tasked with reading the submission, identifying potential reviewers (many don’t respond, and most who do decline), and coordinating the review process. Reviewing a journal paper can easily take three full weeks. When was the last time you had three free weeks just lying around?
Those who accept often miss deadlines, so editors must send reminders or find replacements. By this point, 3–6 months may have passed.
Once reviews arrive, they’re usually "revise and resubmit," which means more rounds of correspondence and waiting.
After acceptance, a copy editor will spend at least two hours on grammar and style corrections.
So: how many hours do you estimate the editor, copy editor, and publishing staff spend per paper?
I can answer that, it varies by journal but typically between $1k and $5k.
> Consider this: when you publish with a journal, they commit to hosting the article indefinitely—maintaining web servers, DOIs, references, back-references, and searchability. >
I seriously doubt that that is worth several $1000 I mean I can buy a lifetime 1TB of storage data from e.g. Pcloud for about $400 and a single article fits easily into 20 MB.
> Next, they employ editors—who are paid—tasked with reading the submission, identifying potential reviewers (many don’t respond, and most who do decline), and coordinating the review process.
Many journals especially the ones that use domain experts as editors, pay nothing or only a pittance.
>Reviewing a journal paper can easily take three full weeks. When was the last time you had three free weeks just lying around?
Editors don't review papers and reviewers (who as you point out do the big work, don't get paid) > > Those who accept often miss deadlines, so editors must send reminders or find replacements. By this point, 3–6 months may have passed.
Those remainder emails are typically automated. That's infuriating in itself, I have been send reminder emails on Christmas day (for a paper that I received a few days before Christmas). Just goes to show how little they value reviewer time. > > Once reviews arrive, they’re usually "revise and resubmit," which means more rounds of correspondence and waiting. >
And that is a lot of work?
> After acceptance, a copy editor will spend at least two hours on grammar and style corrections. >
And in my experience those are contractors, who do a piss poor job. I mean I've received comments from copy editors, that clearly showed they had never seen a scientific paper before.
> So: how many hours do you estimate the editor, copy editor, and publishing staff spend per paper?
The paid staff? 2-3h combined.
But we don't need to even to tally hours, we know from the societies like the IEEE and the OSA, that their journals (in particular the open access ones) are cash cows.