[voracioush]

Don't these commercial publishers hire editors who actively contribute/edit to papers which they choose to publish? Also, don't many of these publishers pay authors for work?

Decrying that they are "socially irresponsible" and that everything should be available for free seems to be looking at this in a very simplistic way.

[logjam]

I've had several peer-reviewed papers published. The reviewers (who are unpaid) often have excellent suggestions and often do the work of an editor.

However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same.

I'm not personally aware of ANY scientific journals where authors or reviewers are paid by journals.

I'm not interested in getting paid for publishing. However, like most other scientists, I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get access to research data and findings that we citizens collectively paid to produce.

This is all anecdotal of course. I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.

[patio11]

The ACM, which is publishing an article by me, offered extensive editing, mostly to help me hit their desired tone. (The article was adapted from something I wrote outside of my academic "voice.")

[_delirium]

Was it in one of the more "magazine-style" publications, like ACM Queue or CACM? I believe those have a more active editorial staff, as compared to stuff like ACM Transactions on Graphics, which requires authors to prepare a publication-ready PDF, with no ACM-provided editing or formatting assistance.

My only personal experience with editorial "assistance" is with an IEEE journal, which totally messed up one of my articles in a way I didn't notice until it had gotten published. They had moved the "related work" section to a sidebar inset, and since I'd read that section a million times I just assumed it was the same (in new location) and didn't read it closely again. Turns out they helpfully reorganized some of the references and discussion of them, so it no longer made much sense, and even had newly introduced grammatical errors.

[scott_s]

I have published in ACM and IEEE conferences, as well as had an article in IEEE Computer. The experiences are very different. The conference paper was all us - formatting, editing, everything. The article in Computer we had multiple iterations with a professional editor whose job was to maintain a consistent "voice" throughout the publication.

[gritzko]

It must have been some "popular" article. 99% of things I consume are classic hardcore CS papers in the classic LaTeX>PDF format. I don't see how somebody might edit such articles without being an expert in the field.

[metageek]

>I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.

I can just imagine the challenge of getting such studies published.

[chalst]

There are many conferences that deal with open access in the context of scholalrly publication. E.g.,

  http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html

Peter Suber keeps a list:

  http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html

Many library science journals are open access, e.g., Ariadne. Example article:

  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/