[Fomite]

In contrast, having submitted to a number of biomedical journals recently:

- The EIC is paid - not a huge amount, but a non-trivial amount. - Graphics work may be done to make figures conform to "house styles" - There is absolutely copy-editing done. Heck, I usually end up fighting with them about copy editing. - We don't use LaTeX, so papers need formatting (and generally, IMO, end up superior to those formatted via LaTeX templates)

Finally, for university presses for books, there are people who evaluate whether a book is worth pursuing, who coordinate peer review, who hound faculty who haven't turned their chapters in yet (something I'm guilty of), etc.

[jzebedee]

This hurts your point more than it helps. Why should anyone care about propping up a journal composed of glorified copyeditors and graphic designers, quibbling over Word formatting to fit their preferred in-house look and feel?

So this is the heavy-hitting work that's supposed to justify closing off knowledge except to those who can pay: because someone might see a paper that had insufficient formatting?

No wonder the reputation for closed-access journals is so thorougly poisoned, when this is exactly the kind of misdirected attention and gatekeeping that's killing it.

[Fomite]

They improved the clarity of the manuscript considerably, and they did the formatting themselves - there was no "quibbling" over it.

And ironically, I was discussing differences in field. The journal in question is open access.