Joseph Gelfer criticises aspects of the paper “But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access” (2009) by John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, with special focus on the value that paid editors can bring in terms of polishing manuscripts.

In the second half of the post, Gelper also points out that…

“the volunteer labor on which many OA journals … are based hides the true cost of doing business. One would expect an economist to make more of this analysis, but the fact that $0 is spent on editing an OA journal does not result in zero cost. Costs come in many shapes and forms: that hour of volunteer copyediting from our editorially skilled and willing academic comes at the cost of their employer, or family, or an hour of leisure activity. … when such [OA] mandates rely on unpaid labor, they also have the potential to erase the skills of academics and publishing professionals who may otherwise reasonably demand an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work … the glossing over of economic realities does no service to OA’s moral high-ground”

The other hidden long-term cost factor here is training. Professionals may have invested years of their life in training courses and self-learning, whereas volunteer OA editors are seemingly expected to “just know how to do it”. Not only are volunteer editors not paid (even in terms of workload allowances), they’re not paid to train for their role either.