I work for one of these publishers doing all of the nothing you're complaining about, so to clarify: how do you suppose we determine who reviews which paper? How do we convince them to actually write the review? How do we know the review is any good? Also, we do typeset and improve prose quality, not sure what those other slackers are doing...
> how do you suppose we determine who reviews which paper? How do we convince them to actually write the review? How do we know the review is any good?
At least in theoretical computer science these tasks are all done by the volunteer conference organizers.
It's possible that this is different than in fields that primarily publish in journals, but it certainly seems like the volunteer approach works just fine.
I have also never seen anything getting improved typesetting or prose. The reviews may reject based on bad writing, or the journal may reject due to latex warnings, but never more than that.
There are many academic fields where people work long hours for little pay, but I imagine theoretical CS is much more comfortable. I'm not surprised people have time and effort to spare, but they are still getting paid, you know. It just happens that the resume byline "conference organizer" is valuable enough in that field.
Sometimes conferences pay a publishing company to do the review process for submissions, by the way. I'm not sure that your submissions are actually getting processed for free by conference volunteers.
I'd rather not disclose details of my employer, sorry.
No conference in CS pays the publishing company (usually IEEE or ACM) to pick reviewers. None whatsoever. Instead, program committee (PC) chairs are selected, and they pick PC members who are responsible for reviews. All of this occurs on a volunteer basis, no matter which institution the PC chairs/members belong to.
> just happens that the resume byline "conference organizer" is valuable enough in that field.
Being editor of a journal/PC chair is a valuable thing in any field, not just CS.
> Sometimes conferences pay a publishing company to do the review process for submissions, by the way. I'm not sure that your submissions are actually getting processed for free by conference volunteers.
Well, I'm sure, because I also review for the same conferences and journals that I submit to!
I don't think anyone will say that publishers should do their work for free or are totally useless.
The problem is about the business practices of the big publishers - asking huge amounts of money for access to journals, forcing universities to buy bundles of journals, to get access to interesting articles they also have to subscribe to stuff they don't want, and so on.
What field are you in? Because at least in mine (information retrieval/machine learning) all the stuff you're talking about is done by volunteers, not paid staff.
