It's similar to a large old software system with lots of customers. Ripping out a feature you've offered forever comes with massive customer disapproval, even if it's the logical thing to do for the product. So in that regard it's easier for the small new entrant to be nimble and not have to deal with maintaining the legacy stuff.

I must insist that this is missing the point. On some level, you seem to (inadvertently, perhaps?) acknowledge this since you qualified your argument with "subscription academic journals".

I would argue that this is an outdated business model, due to the fact that publication costs per se have dramatically dropped.

Of course, it costs more to run an outdated business! Join the PLoS team, or die, I say! (Respectfully, of course!)

To be less dramatic, my argument is essentially this: stop offering subscription-based services. It doesn't work for you for the same reason it doesn't work for the New York Times, and you're suffering the same consequences.

PLoS figured out a formula that works for a portion of the market with PLoS One. Note that that doesn't really work for the humanities and social sciences because the funding situation is so different. So then you have Open Library of Humanities, which is surviving currently on grant money with the hopes that they can get universities to fund their journals (not all that different than subscriptions to be honest, just that they are a nonprofit). But it's entirely unclear if that's going to be sustainable.

So even a brand new state of the art low cost journal needs to find funding somewhere. How that works in STEM might make sense (APCs coming from research funding) but how it works outside of that is entirely undefined.

Regarding the humanities/sciences division, I agree that the market is different. I think, however, that this difference is very accurately modeled by a single factor: technical literacy.

On the whole, I find that the humanities are not interested in the inner workings of computers. They do not care, and it annoys them greatly to think of such things. Now consider the fact that open access online journals are started by tech people, which is to say people from the sciences. Every open-access journal is just too damn complicated for people who don't care about social media, or even social logins. They want (query in) -> (paper out).

I think a simple experiment would be very convincing. Start a journal whose only job is to manage the peer-review process in the most transparent manner possible. University computing centers can donate storage space to the project. The now-slim editorial costs can be covered by modest submission fees -- say $100 for any non-3rd world university.

I posit that if such a system were to be developed, the humanities would latch on immediately. In other words, I suspect the humanities want more open-access and unrestrictive licensing, not less, as it's actually more convenient for them.

In short, I argue that the editorial business is resisting an inevitable market change.

Edit: to end on a more positive note, I'm sure a business opportunity exists for editors who can make present us with a convenient set of tools to work with this data.

If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.

To reiterate, however, I think it'll still be necessary to have some sort of submission fee to cover the costs of peer-review.

A few more points: - people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers)

- most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.

In biology and medicine, NIH open-access requirements mean most articles are converted to XML (http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/). Articles are submitted in Word files, edited and converted to XML via some proprietary complicated toolchain, typeset to PDF with a big proprietary system like Arbortext, and shipped off to PubMed for archiving. Figures are usually TIFFs or PDFs converted to whatever formats are needed for the web or print.

I don't know how the conversion process works, but I suspect that turning arbitrary Word files into semantic XML with accurate bibliographic cross-referencing metadata and high-quality tables and figures requires a lot of manual work. You have to deal with complicated tables, weird Word formatting, and whatever weird styling the authors think is a good idea. The bibliography has to be annotated with DOIs and converted to a standard format.

LaTeX and BibTeX, or some other structured markup language, are undoubtedly much easier to deal with and much easier to automate.

I think Michael Eisen of PLOS has commented on the situation and said they're actively working on rebuilding their publishing toolchain to automate more of the process, since it requires hours of work for every paper.

Sadly, the job of the scientific typesetter is not valued this days any more.

And while easier to automate, I'll take a manuscript laid out by a professional any day of the week.

LaTeX with a good template looks much better than some of the "professional" work I've seen.

Also: the real question here is whether the "professional" layout adds enough scholarly value to make it worth paying the outrageous journal subscription price.

Journals are not intended to be aesthetic experiences. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to disseminate knowledge. High prices are counterproductive to that goal.

I wouldn't be willing to do an editor's job for free (unless underwritten by another employer, as I am for peer review), and I wouldn't expect anyone else to do so either.

Publishing costs are far, far lower than they used to be, but good proofreading and style-guide checking still takes time too.

One of the major journals in my field has a ban on sentences that start with adverbs. I'll admit my writing often uses adverbs it shouldn't but the journal will silently turn sentences like:

> Typically, data are ...

into

> It is typical for data to be ...

instead of rewriting the sentence to avoid starting with "typically" in a more readable way.

At any rate, edits are pretty common, but they're usually to match internal style guidelines, as opposed to editing for readability/content/etc.

As a counter-example, though, I have had one case where a typesetter noticed that I had an incorrect paper in the reference list purely from the actual scientific context in which I was referencing it. It was a really nice catch, and interestingly, it implies that the person doing the typesetting has a _very_ deep background in the field and a very broad knowledge of the relevant literature. It's not something that could have been guessed from the titles of the articles I was referencing without knowing the subject matter intimately.

Sometimes they'll catch a subtle error, sometimes they make edits to bring the document into compliance with their own style guide, and occasionally they'll introduce an error. On balance, they make the publication much stronger and more consistent. I've gotten nice PDFs that highlight the diffs and any questions/concerns they may have.

As an author I am very careful about what I say in my papers and how I say it. If something sounds stilted or odd, there's probably a reason. Words mean things and subtle changes can affect their interpretation. For this reason I do not like being edited by a non expert. If I feel my work needs such attention, I'll ask for it.

Absolutely, 100% agreed. Perhaps this was lost in my confrontational tone, but I agree that academic journals should be paid something.

I'm mostly opposed to paywalls, followed by the amount we're paying.

Where I partially disagree is in the fact that the editing tasks you describe are increasingly offloaded to the submitter.