In my experience the edits are super-minor, the kind of stuff anyone can do on the cheap. Whenever there is doubt, the author is called to rewrite. At least in

In my experience the edits are super-minor, the kind of stuff anyone can do on the cheap. Whenever there is doubt, the author is called to rewrite. At least in neuroscience, i dont think they make any kind of changes in the text other than typos and minor rephrasing (most major suggestions is done by the reviewers). Proofreading and minor final touches are not expensive. It also depends on the author guidelines of each journal. Nature group e.g. has requirements about when your subscripts should be in italics. And i think sometimes they prettify images. I don't care about those things, and it doesnt change a thing about the impact of 99% of papers. Most authors submit great quality manuscripts anyway, judging from what i 've reviewed. In fact i m pretty sure i m doing more copyediting and suggestions while reviewing than any of the paid editors. Another thing is, a ton of effort is wasted in reformatting (and sometimes rewriting) a paper to resubmit to another journal. Publishing is definitely a wasteful process. There are always publishing costs, but it would be cheaper to set up a public utility for proofreading and uploading papers rather than the current situation