[13415]

It's how it has evolved. Journals with good reputations have been taken over gradually since the 1970s by a few larger publishing companies such as Springer, Oxford Journals, Wiley, etc. There are only very few independent journals left in my area. I think it's similar to what the record industry did with record labels. Large publishers did this by luring the journal editors in chief with "free" offers of all kind such as access to editorial systems.

Now for these publishers journals are basically constant cash-cow. Typesetting is done in India (nothing against that) for the lowest possible rate (lots against that). The rest of the work is done by academic volunteers.

The EU has launched a huge open access initiative to the extent that in the future no funding will be available for research published in closed journals, but this doesn't help researchers like me when in their area almost all reputable journals put their articles behind expensive paywall.

You can buy yourself out of this extortion by paying 2000 - 3000 USD per article, but only universities from rich countries can afford it. In a sense, the current situation makes it worse because it increases the imbalance between research in rich and poor countries and sometimes even between privileged and disadvantaged researchers in one and the same country. (For example, some of the researchers at our institute get open access fees paid because they know the right people. The system is not based on merits of the researcher or publication.)

I live and work in Portugal. We have some paid access to a way to small selection of journals. To be honest, I don't even know how to access them from home during Covid times, our IT department doesn't know how to setup a VPN. Even at work it often fails to work, and the accessible journals change from year to year. Everybody uses Sci-Hub for everything anyway.

Without Sci-Hub I could just give up my research - currently on explainable AI, metaethics, nontraditional decision making - and become a waiter.

[Mediterraneo10]

In a way, you are lucky if the journal has outsourced typesetting to some low-quality shop. Some for-profit publishers demand that the unpaid editors do all the copyediting, proofreading, and typesetting, and just provide the publisher with a camera-ready PDF. The for-profit publisher no longer provides any of the added value it once did. (Only distribution is left, and that isn’t a big deal, because even old-school non-profit learned societies manage to distribute their journals to libraries around the world.)

[13415]

I know, I have myself provided camera-ready copies set in LaTeX to for-profit publishers - all of this for free, done in my spare time. I was referring to the end-control of the typsetting, which they still provide, and if it's only in the form of outdated LaTeX templates.

Sometimes it's crazy how incompetent reputable publishers are in academic publishing. The for-profit publisher of my forthcoming book has agreed to accept a LaTeX manuscript. It's written and almost camera-ready. But now they told me they don't really know how this works yet, and so the typesetter has to "open it and convert it" to something else, which will be "time-consuming." After three years, they suddenly changed their mind and want me to provide the manuscript in Word!

[Mediterraneo10]

FWIW, I wasn’t talking about providing a manuscript in LaTeX and the publisher providing "end-control of the typesetting". (LaTeX is generally used for journal publications only in certain STEM fields, and not in my own field.) Rather, I was referring to cases where the for-profit publisher expects e.g. a Word document already fully typeset, and then the publisher does not contribute anything at all to typesetting except its own copyright page.