| I work in CS and we do (mostly) conference publishing. I could be wrong, but I don't think PC chairs are paid, by anybody. Maybe they get free housing at the conference, but this is more of a consolation prize given the amount of work involved. Certainly the rank and file PC members don't get anything. I was on one PC mailing list where one of the organizers accidentally let slip that (some) organizers get free housing, and there was a big uproar in the PC. None of us get anything like that. So this is literally a system where the expert reviewers get nothing, and even the chairs in charge do it nearly for free. What part of this needs to cost money? The peer review comes from the community. The exclusivity and filter comes from the community. Even the funding comes from the community, because community members pay to go to the conference. What the publisher does is, as GP noted, mainly to host PDFs on a website and make sure they stay up. That costs something, but nothing like what the licensing fees for these services are (or the so-called "open access" fees that we now pay). |