There are ~15-20 articles per Nature issue (not counting all the rest). I would assume that over $150,000, or ~3 full-time postdocs yearly nets should be enough for monthly minor editorial work.

In response, review this area of my comment above:

Accurately & skillfully communicating research and results does not completely overlap the Venn diagram skill set of "excellent researcher". Research skills do not equate to communication skills.

Postdocs are no more likely to have their Venn diagrams overlap significantly.

Scientists can be excellent communicators. It seems unlikely that any serious journal would hire editors that were not able to write clearly.

Postdocs was only there to gauge what kind of peoples one can afford with that kind of money.

But in any case, journals don't do any semantic editing on articles, so the whole point is moot: anyone can be an editor as long as they can typeset and maybe spot typos there and there, and neither communication nor research skill is required for that.

> Copy editing is about a lot more than fluff.

a journal will never edit the text beyond typos. their editorials are written from other peers for free. What copy editing?

The people I know that did copy editing reviewed articles for presentation & ordering of material, clarity of expression, and a variety of other factors that make the content more readable.

Take two scientific researcher of the same discipline & scientific skill level, and one of them might be a very poor communicator. Multiple levels of the editorial process addressed those issues, copy editing included.

Changes were not made without the author's approval: They were edited, proofs sent to the author, who signed off, or declined some changes while adding others. It would then be reviewed by the publisher's editors again, and if all went well a final proof was sent out for a final sign off.

I'm not sure why you doubt this sort of thing: I lived in that world, on the tech side of a small/medium scientific publisher, and saw it all happen & built some of the systems that facilitated the process. It wasn't wasted effort: margins weren't very big and where I worked they would have been happy to get rid of a few staffers if the process didn't require them.

If you published an article through a reasonably sized publisher in a somewhat well-known, did you different experience? If so, then either the practices vary greatly among different publishers, or practices have changed a lot since the early 00's (which may very well be the case)

In my experience the edits are super-minor, the kind of stuff anyone can do on the cheap. Whenever there is doubt, the author is called to rewrite. At least in neuroscience, i dont think they make any kind of changes in the text other than typos and minor rephrasing (most major suggestions is done by the reviewers). Proofreading and minor final touches are not expensive.

It also depends on the author guidelines of each journal. Nature group e.g. has requirements about when your subscripts should be in italics. And i think sometimes they prettify images. I don't care about those things, and it doesnt change a thing about the impact of 99% of papers. Most authors submit great quality manuscripts anyway, judging from what i 've reviewed. In fact i m pretty sure i m doing more copyediting and suggestions while reviewing than any of the paid editors.

Another thing is, a ton of effort is wasted in reformatting (and sometimes rewriting) a paper to resubmit to another journal. Publishing is definitely a wasteful process.

There are always publishing costs, but it would be cheaper to set up a public utility for proofreading and uploading papers rather than the current situation

One of my co-worker told me about journals in our field "they will edit it anyway" so I guess it depends on the field and journals. I personally would be against it and I don't understand how it is acceptable that carefully written words by scientists and agreed by co-authors are modified by a random nobody.

Could depend on the publisher as well. When I did tech work for one, changes were proposed to the author. They had to sign off, possibly offer their own modifications, and if they did there would be one more proof sent for approval.

Certain things would get edited automatically without signoff, but only if they were needed to conform to the style guide: some of that was set by the publisher, some by the journal editor.