[drallison]

There are different kinds of journals and so the costs and benefits can differ widely. Academic archival journals typically have volunteer editors whose salary is paid for by their employer rather than the publisher (usually a non-profit society such as ACM). These editors manage the peer-review and acceptance process. Once the papers have been accepted, they go into production and, depending upon the journal and its goals, they may be subject to simple editing for mark-up and obvious spelling/grammatical errors or they may be carefully edited to improve presentation, style, and content. Professional editing greatly enhances the quality and readability of every author's work. This is the traditional publications model used by professional societies. I have no idea what the relative costs are relative to a Wikipedia-style journal with a totally volunteer staff. What I do know is that the amount of human effort that goes into such a quality journal is significant and that no matter what the infrastructure is, someone has to put in that time, and their efforts should be compensated in some fashion.

[MichaelSalib]

I think it helps to distinguish different types of costs. If we're talking about general technical writing editing or assistance getting something latex-ified, that seems like the kind of thing that can be readily pushed back onto authors themselves. For example, the volunteer editor could easily tell an author: "the reviewers loved your work, but you need a technical editor to make this acceptable for publication: hire one, get it fixed up, and submit it in 2 weeks if you want it published". The same thing could be done for Latex help.

From an author's perspective, paying for a tech writer to help them edit would only need to be done if they're actually bad at writing, in which case it seems perfectly fair to have them spend a few hundred dollars paying a local editor to help get their work publishable. The net financial benefit to having another published paper on their CV is certainly worth far more than whatever a good tech writer would charge.

[rick_2047]

I think what you are suggesting here is already being done. I don't have much experience but from what I hear you are required to submit a "Camera Ready" copy of your submission after you have been excepted. That would mean a well formatted and edited work.

[chalst]

It's common to ask authors to have their articles edited at their own expense.