Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
Also, I'm pretty sure my SIG requires LaTeX submissions anyway... I feel like I remember reading that at some point when I submitted once, but I'm not confident in that recollection.
Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals (with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests, in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing only the bare minimum themselves.
The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in any format on the first round, and then only require enough formatting for the typesetters to do their job.
For my area, everybody uses LaTeX styles that more or less produce PDFs identical to the final versions published in proceedings. Or, at least, it's always looked close enough to me that I haven't noticed any significant differences, other than some additional information in the margins.
The reason this doesn't work in practice is that authors don't always play nicely, not because of bad intentions, but because they don't want to cooperate but because of the realities of life: they don't have the time to study style guidelines in detail, they use their own auxiliary LaTeX macro collection because that's what they're used to, or simply because of oversights. Also, typesetting often includes a whole lot of meticulous things, if you listed them all in a guide sheet, that would be a long list of stuff at a level that's too detailed for authors.
I'm not saying it's impossible for authors to fully follow a publisher's style guide but there's a reason publishers employ full time workers who do nothing else but correct submitted manuscripts. Like many other professions, it's a trained skill.
The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they should just be asking for unformatted content (besides figures).
I'm calling bullshit. Look at how annoying the template requirements are for authors: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions, and note the stuff around Word files. Other journals can be much worse. If any serious typesetting were being done by these journals, simple plaintext, Markdown (or RMarkdown) or minimal basic LaTeX, with, admittedly, figures generated to spec, would be more than enough for typesetters to manage. In fact, if you were doing serious typesetting, you wouldn't want your users doing a bunch of formatting and layout themselves, and would demand more minimal representations of the content only. Instead you have these ridiculous templates. I am not convinced AT ALL.
Do authors submitting to literary agents have to follow such absurd rules? I think not. Can modern blogging tools create beautiful sites with simple Markdown and images? Yes. So why do academic publishers demand so much from authors? IMO because they are barely doing anything at all re: typesetting and formatting and the like.
The authors write up their research results.
The editors organize the review process together with the reviewers and the publishing process together with the publisher.
The reviewers read the papers and write their reviews.
The publishers publish the papers.
Stylesheets are typically provided by the publishers and passed on to the authors early on. The reason is two-fold: for one, the publisher wants to produce a high-quality product and uniformity of layouts and styles is an important factor. But the second reason has to do with everything that happens before the publishers even comes into play: common style-sheets also provide some level of fairness because they make the papers by different authors comparable to some degree, e.g., via the max length of a paper.
On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
But like I wrote in another comment here, in doing so, authors do not always adhere to the style guides provided by the publisher - not necessarily maliciously, but the result is the same. For instance, authors might simply be used to handling whitespace a certain way - because that's how they always do it. But if that clashes with the publisher's guidelines, it's one of the things the publisher has to correct in typesetting.
So, perhaps that's the confusion here also to some degree: the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
As I said, if this is the case, the vast majority of typesetting and formatting has clearly been outsourced to submitters, and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains.
EDIT:
> On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
Yes, generally, I don't want to present my formulas and figures in the shitty and limited ways the journal demands, but which would be trivial to present on a website (which is the only way 99.9% of people access articles now anyway). So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated.
This doesn't follow logically, and even though I don't know how it is in other domains, I know for a fact that the amount of typesetting done for a typical CS journal is non-trivial.
> So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated.
I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I don't expect to be able to change them.
Much like the journals that have figure requirements for print, even though the amount of people that have viewed a figure in print in the last 20 years is an order of magnitude less than a rounding error.
In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work.
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That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this.
I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.
But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting.
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I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant one with good numbers is the svpow.com link.
The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial and production". That includes more than type-setting, so it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and whether it's overpriced or not.
The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say "Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is different, like complaining about coffee shops because the vending machine is cheaper.
The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting.
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The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to break out type-setting.
My $0.02, anyway.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.