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Comment by dalai | Hacker News Reader

I used to be an editor in a journal from one of the big publishers (not Elsevier). We searched for reviewers, invited them, reminded them when they were late in responding, evaluated their submissions, send the approvals, etc. And I didn’t get paid a dime. All the publisher had to do was maintain the platform. And sure that costs money too, but the costs are shared between multiple journals and papers.

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Yea, that's not a good model. Better publishers have publishing managers, internal employees assigned to work with editors to get this done.

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.

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Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review and production procedures..."

They're just people running the peer review and production systems (think the online submission system, solving technical issues, writing emails, etc). It's in the name: assistant. They're not the people looking for peer reviewers or doing anything scientific.

As I point out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036 the costs of having employees that "write emails" scales linearly with the number of submissions that are eligible for peer review, not with the number of papers that are successfully published.

I'm sorry, have you ever been involved in the process of publishing a scientific paper as an author or editor? Because it clearly doesn't sound like it from your description in that linked comment. The numbers you write are just nonsense. The assistant editors also don't interact with submitters - that's typically handled by the online platform. They interact with authors when it's time for reviewing proofs, signing documents, etc. But all that only occurs after papers are already accepted.

I've been an author, and just once; never a reviewer or editor. It was with PLOSOne which is different and, though a lot cheaper, is still $2000.

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?

I didn't insinuate anything, I said flat out what I meant. And it seems I guessed right. Your experience is clearly not the usual way it goes.

I'm not even sure why my experience as an author matters. As I said in the very beginning of this giant thread, I work in the industry. Most of the systems I've encountered or heard about are not the beautiful automated platforms critics imagine them to be; and I am not even talking about technical intervention.

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