| > but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free Agreed. 6 hours @ $200/hour for my consulting rates gives $1,200. I give that away for free. What remains is the non-bulk. That's still expensive. Who will do the typesetting and proof reading? In physics and math, this is often pushed into the TeX stylesheet. Not so for most other field. One of the journals I've reviewed for has a box for "does this paper need to be reviewed by a professional statistician?" That costs money. Journals also check for ethical problems, like plagiarism and attempts to game the system, like http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1... . http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1883 recently outlined the costs for PLOS One, an open access biology journal. It costs about $2,000 for them to publish a paper. By comparison, the for-profit journals make about $6,000 per paper. Hence the 40% profit for Elsevier and others. The physics preprint site arXiv costs about $10 per paper, so there's plenty of room, certainly. (There's an increasing growth in "overlay" journals, which build on top of preprint systems.) If you start to pay reviewers actual money, then accountants get involved. Any idea of what it would cost to manage all that overhead, for residents in countries across the world? |