Costs of publishing a journal

["Nat Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

Can anybody answer these questions:

Is there any available data about showing proportion of peer 
reviewers are paid for their work?

What proportion of editors of scholarly journals are paid for 
their work (or paid more than the <$1000 nominal fee)?

I studied under the founder and editor of a highly regarded 
peer-reviewed journal, who also happened to support Open Access 
strongly, and one of his points was that online publication 
applications had obviated the need for much of the staff to 
handle the workflow of publication.  Submissions, queueing, 
distribution to reviewers, distribution throughout the 
decision-making process, and "publishing" the work online are all 
automated, so the actual cost of publishing a peer-reviewed 
journal can be quite low. The app he recommended was open source. 
Infrastructure costs (hosting) can often be footed by 
universities (his publication is hosted by a university which 
hosts many other journals).

As I recall, one of the only real questions in his view was 
whether to pay the editor and peer-reviewers, although he stated 
(anecdotally?) that most scholarly peer reviewers, board members, 
etc.  are essentially volunteers (although they get career 
rewards for their work) -- I think he mentioned that there are a 
handful of notable exceptions among the big name commercial 
journals.  I know there are numerous studies showing how 
commercial journals have much higher costs per page to publish 
than nfp and oa journals, but I don't know why exactly those 
costs are so much higher and I don't buy the handful of defenses/ 
apologies I've seen (tobacco use does cause cancer, global 
warming does exist, and so does commercial journal gouging).

I suppose, since commercial journals don't have access to 
semester after semester of committed intern teams, which give 
university and library published journals an advantage, that is 
probably a factor.  As an intern on a peer-reviewed journal, I 
worked with a team to digitize old print volumes of the journal 
(scan, ocr, copy-edit, html), to help re-design the journal, and 
to convert submitted works to clean html (with slight 
copy-editing duties), so I suppose these could be costs under 
other publishing models. In addition, all of the higher level 
work, the real editor work, was volunteered by scholars in the 
field and the journal's board consisted of international 
scholars, likewise volunteering their work.

As an aside:  it seems to me that a huge advantage of library and 
university published journals, for students, is that grad 
student-interns get the opportunity to learn much more about what 
they are studying to become -- not just to become aware of the 
publications in their field and the work contained therein, but 
also to learn lots of highly applicable real-life lessons about 
some aspects of their upcoming professional lives (and the 
opportunities to network within the field are unique).  Such an 
internship can be a much more valuable learning experience than 
the typical grad student term paper or presentation.  In fact, 
the professor I mentioned above ventured that there should be a 
program to teach universities and libraries how "easy" and 
inexpensive it can be to publish peer-reviewed journals, since a 
journal can be run by a small core of committed faculty and staff 
(each giving some <30% proportion of their work-time), utilizing 
grad students for the grunt work and a rotating set of scholars 
interested in advancing their fields (and in their fields) to 
serve as board members and peer reviewers.  One by-product of 
such a program could be a stiffening of the definition and 
quality of peer review in general, since one complaint I've seen 
published a couple of times is that few commercial journals have 
training or formal assessment programs for their peer reviewers.

****