Publishers oversee peer review, but they are not the one performing it: unpaid researchers do. It is incredible, but, by and large, scientific publishers today

Publishers oversee peer review, but they are not the one performing it: unpaid researchers do. It is incredible, but, by and large, scientific publishers today are utterly ignorant about the science that they publish. (To my knowledge, the only exception to this rule is situations where scientific publishers pay small amounts of money to a scientist to act as an editor: but this only concerns some journals, and still the editor delegates peer review to unpaid reviewers.) In the music world: "Oh, but we are also necessary, because we choose which music to promote! Or rather, we arrange a room where unpaid critics tell us which ones to pick." (And of course, peer review can organize without scientific publishers. For instance, many conferences use EasyChair <http://www.easychair.org/> http://www.easychair.org/>, which is not perfect but at least does not claim copyright on articles. For such conferences, the only role of the publisher (if any) is to obtain a peer-reviewed body of articles, ask authors to sign copyright forms, and sometimes take care of formatting issues.)