Honestly the researchers do most of it for free. The peer reviewers aren’t paid, the editors are also researchers and typically volunteers, lots of people involved can work up a LaTeX or Word template…
Machine learning conferences are a good comparison / example. The conference proceedings are all available free, the reviewers and area chairs are just other researchers, and hosting is on ArXiv and a couple other sites kept up with philanthropic money.
I would say books are different and need more editing, but…y’know…university presses manage to employ editors without also being the sort of bloodsucking parasite that Elsevier is.
Being left to read the abstract because the rest costs a packet is frustrating.
So who pays for editing and production? Because those are professions as well. Curbing excess profit is one thing but we need skilled editors.
Honestly the researchers do most of it for free. The peer reviewers aren’t paid, the editors are also researchers and typically volunteers, lots of people involved can work up a LaTeX or Word template…
Machine learning conferences are a good comparison / example. The conference proceedings are all available free, the reviewers and area chairs are just other researchers, and hosting is on ArXiv and a couple other sites kept up with philanthropic money.
I would say books are different and need more editing, but…y’know…university presses manage to employ editors without also being the sort of bloodsucking parasite that Elsevier is.
It’s tax payer funded. Those funds should ideally cover every aspect of research from preliminary work to publishing and production