Can you elaborate on this role and why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? (Genuine question, I don't know editor's role in academia at all)

Editors basically make sure that the good research get published and the bad ones are thrown out. They invite submissions, do basic QA, find potential reviewers and send the submissions out for review, make final accept/reject or revision decision. Only after that the publishers do the actual work, e.g. copy-editing, proofing, printing and distribution of the research.

Top journals usually have distinguished professors from reputed institutions in the editorial panel. That's why we can rely (somewhat) on peer-reviewed articles in those journals instead of random blog posts or arXiv submissions.

> why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease?

Well I can only imagine the pain and suffering such person and their loved ones would go through, but I guess it will give them some glimmer of hope and respite. Most people lack the expertise to understand and follow cutting edge research, so someone in a position to understand the research and simultaneously benefit from it personally should have access to the said research by all means.

A good editor can make or break a journal. Some of the ones who are the best at what they do are amazing.

Many (most?) academic journals don't do a significant amount of editing. They leave that to the author and reviewers.

Article selection itself is editing, as is setting up the processes for review and acceptance.

That said, I think academic publishing is a criminal industry and Alexandra Elbakyan a modern day superhero.

Fully agree. We were having a heated discussion last night about this in my grad student circle. In the end we felt pressure must be put on the big players in the industry, such as Elsevier, to move away from the profit maximization model. It will take a lot of hard work and sacrifice from many in the academia to do so, not just because Elsevier is so big and influential, but also the fact that the stakeholders like the researchers- professors, post-docs and grad students are such a diverse community with very wide range of purpose and motivations. One avenue could be through the authorities in Netherlands and EU where they are based. The other solution would be to remove some anonymity from the peer review process- make the reviewer comments public at the least, to somewhat improve the quality of science that is being generated these days.

If you focus solely on the publishers, your impact will be minimal; they can ignore you. But publishers get all their money from institutions. So you could focus your energy on forcing institutions to stop using the publishers. But you will find that institutions don't want the model to change. They want to pay less money for publishing, but they don't actually want to lose the paid journals, because their whole research funding model would collapse, as it's built entirely around the reputation of the journal. Either institutions have to completely re-invent how they fund and organize research, or someone has to get paid to do the actual work of maintaining journals.

The publishers' profit margins are one thing; anyone could start a competing publisher tomorrow and take a fraction of the profit. But people are not asking for reduced profit, they're asking for abolishment of paid publishing, which is like saying, let's abolish the entire system of scientific research.

This.

Journals are gatekeepers to funding, prestige, academic disciplines, careers, advancement, etc., etc.