A few kinds of support: Non-publishing: Some of these journals provide genuine monetary support for their sponsoring society, which then go to fund travel scho

A few kinds of support: Non-publishing: Some of these journals provide genuine monetary support for their sponsoring society, which then go to fund travel scholarships, put on conferences, etc. Publishing: This will depend highly on the field - a lot of people who assert that journals add nothing come from fields where LaTeX is the standard format journals are submitted in, so journals don't do much in the way of formatting. But this is not all fields. Most of my papers (I'm in a Word-standard field) get page layout, and a page layout I find significantly more pleasant to read than most LaTeX documents. I've also had my papers get fairly strong copy editing, and I already carefully copy edit my papers. I've seen some other papers that have definitely been much improved by the editorial staff. In at least one paper, I had a figure redone by them in the journal's style.