The usual complaint is that articles are produced by authors (in a journal-ready format!), who pay for the privilege, edited by the author and volunteers through a peer review process (the reviewers are the "volunteer labor driven by intra-guild prestige considerations" you allude to), distributed through arXiv by the authors, etc.
The journals don't even provide much editorial filtering -- that's the peer reviewers again. It's not clear that the money that pours into Elsevier goes towards anything other than advertising, lobbying, minimal operating expenses, and profit. And, I guess, some proofreading which is notoriously sloppy ("they like to change equations to make them wrong", says one professor I know) and doesn't include formatting or structural/semantic changes (that's left to the peer review process).
Actually, a lot of physics journals are open-access, so it's evident that the massive subscription fees aren't necessary to do what they do. (They only charge a small fee to authors.)
Math has a few "arXiv overlay" open-access journals that don't charge the author fee either, IIRC, and seem to accomplish this by cutting down on operating costs in ways that don't matter.
(I'm open to being convinced that journals provide some value, I just don't see where.)
no subject
Do they do this? In what sense?
The usual complaint is that articles are produced by authors (in a journal-ready format!), who pay for the privilege, edited by the author and volunteers through a peer review process (the reviewers are the "volunteer labor driven by intra-guild prestige considerations" you allude to), distributed through arXiv by the authors, etc.
The journals don't even provide much editorial filtering -- that's the peer reviewers again. It's not clear that the money that pours into Elsevier goes towards anything other than advertising, lobbying, minimal operating expenses, and profit. And, I guess, some proofreading which is notoriously sloppy ("they like to change equations to make them wrong", says one professor I know) and doesn't include formatting or structural/semantic changes (that's left to the peer review process).
Actually, a lot of physics journals are open-access, so it's evident that the massive subscription fees aren't necessary to do what they do. (They only charge a small fee to authors.)
Math has a few "arXiv overlay" open-access journals that don't charge the author fee either, IIRC, and seem to accomplish this by cutting down on operating costs in ways that don't matter.
(I'm open to being convinced that journals provide some value, I just don't see where.)