> what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what they once promised

> what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what they once promised to be. Initially many respected journals were published by non-profit learned societies. (In some fields, like certain branches of linguistics, they still are.) For-profit publishers originally told those learned societies that if they handed their journals over to the corporation, the corporation could perform more high-quality editing, proofreading, and typesetting and do it more economically. Fast forward a few decades, and the for-profit corporations are no longer providing those things. Proofreading and copyediting is now all on the unpaid editorial team (or even on the individual authors). Typesetting is often on the unpaid editorial team, and the publisher wants the unpaid editorial team to simply provide a camera-ready PDF. So, yes, in the end the for-profit publisher is just providing printing and distribution (which even the non-profit learned societies managed to do just fine) and a vague “reputation and attention”. Sounds like a raw deal.