[jcranmer]

It is actually quite time-consuming to do the editorial tasks of a journal:

* Ensure that the content of a submission meets minimal guidelines for submission.

* Figure out who appropriate reviewers might be. This means figuring out which research areas are relevant, filtering out reviewers who might have conflicts of interest (same institution, previous advisor/advisee relationship, recent collaboration, etc.). You also need to ensure that you load balance reviews across reviewers.

* Appropriately double-blind the submission so that the reviewers don't know who submitted the paper, and the authors don't know who reviewed the paper. You are now an intermediary for all of this communication.

* Make a judgement call of which papers will be accepted for publishing.

* You need to facilitate necessary edits from the authors to get it ready to publish.

* Convert paper formats, supplementary data, etc. for uploading. Basically all the editing tasks that you probably thought was the only thing on this list.

* Oh, and reviewers and authors are likely professors who are horribly oversubscribed in terms of their time, so you need to play babysitter to make sure that the tasks actually get done in a reasonable manner.

When you consider how few papers actually get published, and just how much administrative work is required to publish a paper, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars to publish a paper is not unreasonable.

[Someone1234]

Scientific Journals make 36% margin[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[jcranmer]

Put another way, that means that if you eliminated all profit from costs, you'd cut the price by only a third (not to a third). That's still hundreds-to-thousands of dollars per article.

[dwheeler]

No, it'd only cost so much if the alternative did the same thing, and that would be a foolish thing to do. It costs a lot of money to restrict access to information: you have to print lots of paper, use digital rights management (DRM), have an army of people to negotiate and manage expensive contracts with libraries, and so on. You may want to write and maintain special search engines. You also have to employ an army of lawyers to sue anyone and everyone who has the temerity to share scientific research (even though the publisher didn't pay for the research to be done in the first place), as well as try to track down those evil people who dare share publicly-funded scientific work.

An open access journal doesn't have to do any of that. They have to have some editors do final editing (who get paid), a website where they post the article, and they'll probably pay a CDN (so the website doesn't even need to be very fast). If they're smart they'll create a static (generated) website, which is extraordinarily cheap to maintain today. They don't need to create paper copies - if someone wants a paper copy, that individual can print it. They don't need to worry about the massive overhead of digital rights management (DRM) systems, because they don't need them. They don't need to negotiate expensive contracts with libraries (they still have to negotiate small contracts for editing and such, but small dollar amounts are easier to manage). Normal search engines can use their data directly, so they don't need their own search engine. You don't need an army of lawyers to punish the sharing of scientific results that were paid for by society; you don't even need to track down those people who were sharing scientific results. An open access journal needs reviewers, but they are already volunteers, so that wouldn't change.

For-profit publishing requires a tremendous amount of overhead that provides no value to society. Publishers do it because they can do all that and still make a giant profit, and they can just pass all those costs on to society.

[laurentl]

More than that probably. At 36% margins you don’t really have to worry about cost efficiency - there’s probably a lot of cost savings to be had hiding behind all that free cash flowing around (and if that 36% margin disappears, it won’t take long for the CFO to find them).

[buboard]

The kind of work you describe though is small, compared to the effort the scientists have to put to conform with the journal's author guidelines [about the detailed formatting of the paper and the figures etc], and the amount of time it takes to the reviewers to review the paper. Authors often suggest the reviewers themselves - but even if they don't the editor just goes through the list of people who have published on the same subject in their journal before - that doesnt sound that hard or time consuming. Double-blindness is not even a concern in the age of computers. Their judgement call is usually made by the reviewers, and their role is limited to cases that are on the fence, and even then it's more of a roll of a dice . They often do a lousy job at keeping with deadlines - you ll sometimes have to nudge them to get some progress. Babysitting is the wrong term, given that reviewers are generally more qualified scientists than the editor. But yeah when you expect to get free work, you have to do a bit hustling for it.

I m not saying it doesnt cost some amount, but for high impact journals a lot of the cost goes to publicity work, which in the end benefits the status of the paper but not science.

[asoplata]

Many of those jobs are done by the same academics as authors and reviewers who also work pro bono or for very little money as well.