In contrast, having submitted to a number of biomedical journals recently:
- The EIC is paid - not a huge amount, but a non-trivial amount.
- Graphics work may be done to make figures conform to "house styles"
- There is absolutely copy-editing done. Heck, I usually end up fighting with them about copy editing.
- We don't use LaTeX, so papers need formatting (and generally, IMO, end up superior to those formatted via LaTeX templates)
Finally, for university presses for books, there are people who evaluate whether a book is worth pursuing, who coordinate peer review, who hound faculty who haven't turned their chapters in yet (something I'm guilty of), etc.
This hurts your point more than it helps. Why should anyone care about propping up a journal composed of glorified copyeditors and graphic designers, quibbling over Word formatting to fit their preferred in-house look and feel?
So this is the heavy-hitting work that's supposed to justify closing off knowledge except to those who can pay: because someone might see a paper that had insufficient formatting?
No wonder the reputation for closed-access journals is so thorougly poisoned, when this is exactly the kind of misdirected attention and gatekeeping that's killing it.
- The EIC is paid - not a huge amount, but a non-trivial amount. - Graphics work may be done to make figures conform to "house styles" - There is absolutely copy-editing done. Heck, I usually end up fighting with them about copy editing. - We don't use LaTeX, so papers need formatting (and generally, IMO, end up superior to those formatted via LaTeX templates)
Finally, for university presses for books, there are people who evaluate whether a book is worth pursuing, who coordinate peer review, who hound faculty who haven't turned their chapters in yet (something I'm guilty of), etc.