I do peer review myself and am familiar with the model. IMO, when I'm contacted to review someone's work, the journal employee contacting me is performing a legitimate service. They did research to find my name and email and determine that I'm competent to assess the paper. They or another editor have also reviewed the paper in the first place to determine if it's worthy of being peer-reviewed at all, which requires some domain-specific knowledge. And if I pass on peer reviewing, they have to find another person to ask, and so on. Multiplied by dozens of papers, that can be a substantial amount of work.

I also think that you underestimate the importance of copy-editors. It's not the job of a peer reviewer to make sure that the author uses an apostrophe properly, etc. There needs to be a specialist who is dedicated to catching those errors, particularly since, as you note, peer-reviewers aren't directly compensated so it's unfair to burden them with a whole other set of responsibilities.

> I also think that you underestimate the importance of copy-editors

Many Elsevier and Springer journals no longer perform copy-editing. Authors are expected to have their paper checked by a native English speaker and copy-edited at their own expense, and then provide the journal with a camera-ready PDF. In my own field, it is the open-access journals published by non-profits that actually have the best language quality and typesetting.

This is a problem that goes beyond journals into for-profit scholarly publishing more generally. In my field, Brill is an infamous publisher for this: it demands camera-ready PDFs for most of the monographs it puts out. So, your library ends up having to spend 400€ on a book where about all the publisher contributed – besides unpaid peer review – is printing, binding, and mailing it out.

> There needs to be a specialist who is dedicated to catching those errors,

I think "needs" might be too strong here. We (the field of CS) get by without it just fine -- the standard practice is to include copy-editing "nits" at the end of one's review. A shepherd, assigned during the final phase, does a final pass on the paper before approving it.

Yup. Typos slip through. There are papers with poor English. Oh well. For the most part, it works out pretty well.

(And as a reviewer, I have little objection to also noting writing fixes while I'm reading your paper. I'm going to spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 hours reading the thing -- the writing fixes are a small additional cost. If you've done a decent job on the writing in the first place. If it's totally botched, I'll reject your paper and tell you to fix it before submitting it again. :-)

Now, would I prefer that the authors of submitted papers had to pay $50 for someone to do a copy-editing pass before I reviewed it? Heck yes. But perhaps we'll get DNNs to fix this for us one of these days. :)

That's a fair point. One thing I'm getting from this discussion is that it's difficult to generalize when it comes to academic publishing, because norms vary substantially between fields. I've seen the copy editing "nits" you mention at the end of reviewers' letters in my field (history) but I suspect that historians would rebel if the copy editor's job was entirely foisted off on us.

Likewise, it's normal for editors in my field to make meta-level suggestions about writing style. I'd wager that history journals place a greater emphasis on prose style than CS journals do, since making an historical argument often depends on telling a compelling narrative. Hence a publishing model that works for a CS journal might not work for humanities journals and vice versa.

Absolutely. And our papers are a fair bit shorter than yours, for the most part. :). 14 pages, 2 column, 10 or 11pt type is the norm for us, with figures and references included.

Even if we don't put all the copy-editing burden on the author (it's their reputation that is affected by the mistakes), the costs for organizing peer review and copy-editing could be covered by a fairly small submission fee, or alternatively donations or the sale of hard-copies. You could even offer freemium models where anyone can read the papers for free, but value-add options are sold to libraries and universities (integration into library catalog, better search, etc).

I think something like the freemium model you mention is the way to go. As others have mentioned in this discussion, the alternatives simply rely on pushing the costs to different sectors (like funding agencies or even, in the worst case scenarios, researchers themselves). I keep waiting for this sort of thing to happen. Perhaps it could even be bundled into some kind of social network that would offer an alternative to academia.edu. It seems that there is a lot of inertia when it comes to scholarly publishing though.

Let me rephrase that a little. In your first paragraph you argue that the work journals actually do is finding others to do the real work. And in the second paragraph you say that the copy editor is there to catch missing apostrophes. It's true that that is not "zero" work, but it's not a very strong case. And it certainly does not justify the absurd cost model we are currently stuck with.

We agree, it absolutely doesn't justify the current cost model. I hate having to donate my time to Elsevier as much as the next academic.

Maybe I gave the wrong impression by mentioning apostrophes, however. Professional copy editing is, in my view, super important in terms of differentiating a good journal from a bad or mediocre journal. As is the vetting procedure of finding appropriate peer reviewers and coordination between them. Whether or not you think of that as "real" work compared to producing actual research, it is still work that should be compensated in some way, in my view.

An analogy might be the professor teaching a class vs the maintenance guys who makes sure the projectors are working and the lights turn on. One might be more important than the other, but I don't think either should be working for free.

@benbreen even if some papers vet peer reviewers, I've heard many just use suggestions for reviewers provided by the author...