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It'll go through the editors first, in the case of Nature these are paid positions. There's a paid "Associate Editor" position at PLOS too, responsible for "Assessing new submissions and guiding manuscripts through the review process" and more. A submitted paper does not simply turn up in reviewers inboxes, there are steps in between. I think people pick a few elements of the whole process and then say everything else is negligible. If paid, the academic editors and reviewers may well end up costing a huge amount compared to the spend elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as saying those other costs are small. The proportion here is largely irrelevant. The associate editor position on glassdoor is about £40k/year, which is £45k including tax costs. Let's say that's £47k including pension contributions as it works out neatly. In the UK there are 47 working weeks, roughly so that's £1k employment cost per week purely on that one employee. That's £25/hour. At an 80% rejection rate that's actually £125/hour, at 90% it's £250/hour and 95% that's £500/hour on accepted papers (not quite, but useful for the comparison). For only a single employee, and only their direct salary. Of course now we need to add things like the HR costs, hiring costs, building rent, computer equipment, management, etc. Double? How much time of their day actually goes to the core task and not other meetings/etc. All these things multiply up and I'm really not that surprised that the costs go up to these amounts. I have absolutely no doubt that if the other editors were paid and the reviewers were paid then this would go up dramatically, but that's a different issue. |