[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.