Remind me again how much the reviewers get paid.
This kind of points to rent-seeking or cartel behavior, doesn't it? If this was a competitive market a publisher could get an upper hand by automating and offering their services at a lower rate.
But let's accept it at face value. And now take it all the way. Suppose you reject 15 papers for every single one accepted.
And suppose that accepted pays $3K
So what costs $200 per rejection?
What is that work that you need to put in that adds up to costing $200 per rejection? Or $300 or $500?
In my experience at least half (if not more) of the rejections come right from the editorial desk ... someone spending 5 minutes with the paper.
Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the editorial desk.
We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review. I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15.
In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.
$200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 / hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop) threads of communication that eventually get a review to completion.
And I did not include in that calculation anything that even remotely includes any other administrative costs, or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"
All that is either handled automatically -sending emails to people who submitted articles on online submission systems- or performed by unpaid editors -soliciting reviews, desk rejection or communicating with authors to request clarifications or respond to questions, chasing reviewers, and so on, and so forth.
But, hey, if the editors in your journal get paid for all this drudgery, then please let me know where to apply.
Look, I understand that your livelihood depends on this but I encourage you to consider the possibility that the vast majority of academics who think journals like yours are leeches might have a point.
In my view, the arguments are much weaker than the people making them believe they are. I don't mean to say they hold no water. I just mean that they are not made from people who stare at financial spreadsheets day in/day out trying to make a red number become black.
From https://www.mdpi.com/editors "MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house staff consists of Managing Editors, Assistant Editors, Production Editors, English Editors, Copyeditors, Data Specialists, Software Engineers and Administrative Specialists. Except for most English Editors, all are employed by MDPI and its subsidiaries and work at the MDPI offices. Our collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards are typically employed at academic institutions or corporate research facilities located all over the world.
...
Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review and production procedures..."
As an author, I exchanged multiple emails with employees of PLOS even before it was submitted to peer review (or reached the editor desk) because the automated process of submitting my paper to the system crashed and required intervention. And mine was N=1, and it still broke. It's not "Google-quality engineering", if you know what I mean. So, all this "oh, that's just an automated system" just does not hold water.
Now, my turn to insinuate. Have you ever written a multi-step workflow management software system that coordinates thirty email threads? If yes, how much human involvement from the operators of that multi-step workflow is needed? And if not a whole lot, do you work at a "cool" VC-funded modern firm, or at a company that got started with servers in a datacenter in the 1990s?
People pontificate about why something is the way it is, then someone with actual experience steps in and explains, then they get attacked, downvoted and told "no that's no true".
LOL