[notyourday]

If this was the case then the journals would not be sold to publishers. They are sold to publishers because EICs and societies that start journals do not want to deal with actually making the manuscript publishable after a year or two.

P.S. Average STEM paper takes about 30 hours to "produce".

[dmitriz]

This was the case 30 years ago when publishing was expensive. Today this should be a button click in a fully automated system.

Which is not to say, societies don't benefit from the system -- they actually get a lot of $$ from it. The sad part is, they only get a small part from the much bigger $$$ going to publishers.

[notyourday]

It is not. Publishing industry, especially academic journal publishing barely changed in last twenty years. At best there's now a workflow management systems that exist inside the publishers.

The bottom line is: if what technies claim publishing is could be was the case then the EIC/Societies would be publishing journals themselves.

Publishers are the AWS/GC/Azures of the world. They get to collect money from those that publish papers and need papers because they provide service that the paper writers can't seem to figure out how to do themselves ( it is not very surprising - quite a few of even the well known authors of well known papers even today insist on proofs being sent to them via fax, correct those with a pen and fax back corrections ).