by yielding publishing rights to a journal the journal gets to collect small bits of money from lots of people, the bearable cost of editing for any researcher would be quite a bit smaller, effectively for these publishers selling editing as a service is a no-go.
Many researchers at the moment happily pay APCs (=Open Access article processing charges) in the several thousands of dollars — this is way more than is required as a minimal cost of editing. In fact, you can easily hire a freelance editor to work on your paper for less. If the process becomes minimally streamlined it could be made very affordable: at the moment, a lot of the work of a journal editor is (intentionally, as well as due to inertia) due to the utter lack of streamlining.
I'm not surprised if their actual costs are in the range of thousands of dollars, because they typically have horrible typesetting workflows that take your nice LaTeX, mangle it into QuarkXPress and give you a PDF for proofreading with tens or hundreds of annoying small errors. Which you have to find and point out, and then they fix every single one manually in their horrible software.
It's not the cost of a value-adding service, but the cost of having a huge technical debt that nobody has bothered paying down on.
what they are saying is that it would be a personal decision, like choosing what to drink, some home-made tea or a coke from the vending machine. you choose if you edit yourself, or spend part of your paycheck to delegate the task
Word processors take a long time to learn to use well, with the time invested paying back much lower dividends than learning to use (La)TeX well. That is what I meant.
I fully agree learning (La)TeX is superior of "word processors" which is a bit of a glorified name for invisible markup, it is seldom a good idea to dumb down on the user.
I misread your "I never understand this argument." as not understanding what consp wrote, "this" was a bit ambiguous, and I originally thought you meant "I'm the scientist, let me do science instead of communicating clearly what I did and observed" but now I see "this" referred to the argument consp quoted. So we are both agreeing with him. Add to that that I was confusing a sibling comment with what consp wrote. :)
