Is that true? If so, what is the use of that? I don't see any scientific added value. I never even noticed such an activity myself. We can get rid of it where it still exists.
> Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper
$40k per paper ? Haha sorry but I just don't buy that.
I'm not asserting these expenses don't exist. However (see my other comments in this thread), I'm showing that you can avoid them, and how the same quality control of publication can be obtained without having publishers around. And in the example I took close to everything is done in the traditional way. Which in turns is a demonstration that publishers added-value is minimal.
To prevent bad papers from getting through. Editors at a paper are the first filter, peer reviewers are the second.
¹ In some other cases such as with Nature, what you said is true. But the point is that the model you are describing is far from being the only one, and there is no evidences that it is better. In computer science for example, the most prestigious venues are conferences not journals, and in that cases the publishers does nothing until the very end of the process, where its work often consists in putting PDFs online and that's it.
If you're going to throw around phrases like "vast majority", can you cite numbers?
Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper (see http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...). You seem to be skeptical of such claims, but simply asserting that the expenses don't exist isn't enough.