> Many are the result of partial or complete university funding.
The universities are not paid by the journals, — quite the opposite: they pay handsomely for access the work of their own researchers.
The universities are not paid by the journals, — quite the opposite: they pay handsomely for access the work of their own researchers.
In most cases the journals are edited by the same people who write for them, for free (sometimes there'll be a pittance salary, but it's not enough to quit your day job by any means).
The "incomprehensible gibberish" is, in general, fully comprehensible by their intended audience, which is other academics working in the same field.
Here's how the model works:
1) Academic writes the article, supported by taxpayer funding, or a grant from a foundation, or whatever. 2) Academic submits the article to the journal, where it is peer-reviewed and edited by other academics. 3) None of these academics get paid a cent for their work (other than the aforementioned public funding). In specific, the journal publisher doesn't pay them anything. Some of them even CHARGE the author. 4) The journal publisher then sells the result for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.
Nice gig for the publishers. Less so for the academics and the taxpayers.
This model made a certain degree of sense back when journals had to be printed (short print runs are expensive, especially stuff with lots of diagrams, weird equations, foreign languages, etc. as journal articles tend to be), then physically distributed by paper mail to institutions all over the world.
That's no longer the case.
I know people who edit academic journals, and have published in them myself.
Your claim that editorial costs are what drives journal prices is completely without merit.
Few journals below the level of, say, Nature, have paid staff, and few academics would tolerate major rewrites of their work by an editor anyway.
The importance of copyediting a scientific paper
D. J. Bernstein
2005.05.04
As for the point re: editing, this is just not true. Academic journal submissions are by highly educated PhDs at the best universities; the editors on the other side just aren't as well trained. Post-submission copy editing is minimal; most of the effort by journal editors is on formatting. The reason is that in many cases the journals have failed to invest in a proper publication workflow so they have to spend time converting Word documents into their in-house style, rather than just (a) distributing a LaTeX template or (b) working on a common interchangeable format and simple rich text editor. Some of the more computational journals, like Bioinformatics or NAR in compbio do have LaTeX formats, but many like Science, Nature, or Cell do not.
So their editorial costs for their human army arise because they didn't invest in a few engineers to build a simple rich text frontend with pdf preview functionality. They are manually doing simple asserts like checking character counts in headline text rather than doing that via client-side JS. Things like that are the cost centers here. A shame.
This is not true. Most editors are PhD-trained people (after all, they have to select the reviewers of a paper, which requires knowing the relevant people in a field who are capable of evaluating a paper). In some of the smaller, field-specific journals, editors are themselves volunteers from academia (go to your local university, find some lesser known journal and check the inside cover, which usually lists the editorial board of the journal. You'll see that most of them are university faculty).
Let me paint you a picture of a hypothetical alternative system: a publicly funded, 100% free-to-access online system where academics can submit papers, and then other academics can peer review them. Papers and authors are ranked by an open-source algorithm that takes into account factors such as the number of citations, the quality of the papers making the citations, results of peer reviews, the quality of the peer reviewers and so on. Doesn't that sound like a better place for our shared cultural knowledge, that belongs equally to everyone, than being locked-up and monetised by a handful of private companies?
But I did all of my journal editing as a grad student in college. Technically, it was my advisor's job to do it, but he was too busy with non-mundane things, so this kind of work got passed off to his students. None of us were paid for the work, of course. It was just understood that you do it because you have to (grad students need good recommendations, and advisors to those grad students need to play politics with the journal committee). As far as I can tell most editing for most journals is done for free by various university professors and (mostly) their students. More prestigious journals like Nature and Science probably have their own editors do an addition pass after this, but most don't seem to do that.
It might be different in some fields, but that's how it works in my field (mechanical engineering), and it seems to be that way in other engineering fields as well.