Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.

Peer review absolutely add costs. Finding a reviewer who's qualified, free and willing takes time and effort, and that's increasing by the day. Frankly, I think peer review is doomed. There's now a flood of AI-generated papers that journals need to weed out, and even 99% success is not good enough for peer-reviewers' workload and continued respect. On top of that, natural demographics, the cuts to university funding in the West and the improvement of education in Africa, Asia and South America mean there is a greater and greater proportion of young researchers to experienced, overburdened researchers, and that's just too much load to bear.

It might be easier to find reviewers if they were compensated for their time instead of volunteers for a for-profit publisher.

Believe it or not, not enough to make a difference. The limiting factor is qualified academics' time.

Depending on the discipline, there are plenty of people with PhDs who are adjuncting for low wages. And for other disciplines, plenty of people with PhDs who work in industry. And plenty of people without PhDs who know enough to find errors in papers (I've found conclusion breaking errors in two so far).

As soon as you pay reviewers, you now have to deal with people pretending to be academics and pretending to review a paper just to earn money, which adds additional cost. Not to mention that money can introduce biases even if the reviewer is genuine.

Someone is getting paid to loop in the peer-reviewers in the first place. Probably not a lot for any given article, but it's something.

I guess peer-reviewers may save money by doing some editing that the paid editor would have to do instead. I don't know how this balances out.

Did the previous comment get edited? It didn't seem to be talking about publishing costs.

if only the reviewers were paid I'd understand the question in the context of price gauging. however the journal does _not_ pay the reviewers.

the question how to best organize academic peer review is independent from the price gauging.

The need for a journal in the first place is, in small part, to coordinate peer-review. Eliminate pre-publication peer review and you eliminate, in a small part, the need for a journal.

The fact that a coordinator like a publisher exists isn’t necessarily in dispute. Sometimes it’s necessary to have a 3rd party coordinate reviewers, maintain quality standards, and settle plagiarism disputes. The issue is the price. It’s wholly unreasonable to charge $30 to read a paper, to charge a PI upwards of $2k-$7k to remove the $30 reader charge, or to charge whatever ungodly amount they charge libraries to offer free access to researchers.

Like I said, I’d value the service I get at a factor of 10-20x less than what they charge.

(Edited for formatting)

Reviewers are paid by not having to pay for reviews of their own papers. To be sure, many reviews are not worth the time to read them, but the good ones have been invaluable to increasing the quality of my work.

The journals don't actually do peer review. They are really only an expensive distribution network with limited reach due to cost expense on the reader side.