[p4bl0]

I guess this varies a lot across domains, but in computer science for instance, most of the management and administration is done by researchers too, using platforms such as EasyChair for example. So there isn't any cost here either. At the end when all the work is done, the publisher receives the work and only has to put its stamp on it. Okay I may be exaggerating: last time I published in a Springer journal they did two additional things to my paper: they changed the page number color from black to blue, and they changed all the internal references to other section from "Sec. n" to "Sect. n"… Clearly that must have cost the $3500 in APCs that they asked to make the paper open access.

Of course neither me nor my lab could afford that so I just went with the regular way, signed their fucking copyright release form while cursing a lot against them, and in the end didn't really care because in my field (cryptology), most of the papers are on the IACR ePrint Archive even before they are published (including mine) and they are updated there when they change.

So, my personal experience and my research on the subject (I have done a lot of work on open access, see http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html which is only available in French for now) say that no, the publishers work is most of the time not that important: for instance in my case if the conference or journal just published a list of links to the accepted versions of the paper on the IACR ePrint archive, the cost of publishing would decrease drastically and the quality of the publication would not change at all.