This was the case 30 years ago when publishing was expensive.
Today this should be a button click in a fully automated system.
Which is not to say, societies don't benefit from the system -- they actually get a lot of $$ from it. The sad part is, they only get a small part from the much bigger $$$ going to publishers.
It is not. Publishing industry, especially academic journal publishing barely changed in last twenty years. At best there's now a workflow management systems that exist inside the publishers.
The bottom line is: if what technies claim publishing is could be was the case then the EIC/Societies would be publishing journals themselves.
Publishers are the AWS/GC/Azures of the world. They get to collect money from those that publish papers and need papers because they provide service that the paper writers can't seem to figure out how to do themselves ( it is not very surprising - quite a few of even the well known authors of well known papers even today insist on proofs being sent to them via fax, correct those with a pen and fax back corrections ).
> You are seriously giving authors too much credit.
Sure, how can we credit someone who did the research and prepared the paper in its publish-ready form :)
> The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing
Absolutely! Such as introducing new errors by people with no subject understanding. :)
> that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers.
They are sold to them for the very simple reason: $$$ they get from it :)
> Graphs do not fit the page ...
If any of these are not acceptable, the journal is perfectly correct to request changes from the author. Which I as author would prefer over introducing damages by people with no idea what my papers are about.
There's no such things as "a journal" that "goes to authors for requests". It is a job of EIC, which EIC does for a journal that self-publishes. EICs hate doing it. That's why they sell their journals to publishers.
Having published over 50 research papers, I've never experienced any value from the journal's so-called typesetting. In fact, that "value" was typically strictly less than zero with all their newly introduced typos and misleading corrections by someone who has no idea about the subject. So why are forced to accept this kind of service and how does world science benefit from it?
Calling the APC "the OA model" and conveniently forgetting to mention other options has been precisely the common publishers' rhetoric feeding deliberate public confusion in trying to identify OA with APC, which needless to say, helps their business objectives.
Because "services" by the likes of E are of no value to CS professors designing some of the much more advanced software. But they are sadly focusing on their own journals and not trying to help the other subjects.
