Reviewers don't get paid indeed. It used to be that in exchange for getting published, you'd join a pool of reviewers that got to review new submissions. I revi

Reviewers don't get paid indeed. It used to be that in exchange for getting published, you'd join a pool of reviewers that got to review new submissions. I reviewed plenty of papers like this. Many of them pretty bad too. It's not a fun job and it's important to do it well because some other sorry person is going to be reviewing your paper at some point. The price of publishing is having to read a lot of poorly written papers. Editors don't actually get involved with the review process unless there is some conflict. Editors are of course paid positions. Their job is to keep supply and quality up. Generally, they get more hands on later in the process. The only cost beyond that is indeed some simple, mostly automated, layout work and file hosting. Some of the more prestigious publications have actual professional editors on staff that work with authors to improve style and quality. But most scientific journals don't do any of that. Actually printing the papers is rare these days. It's mostly online at this point. I've been out of academia for twenty years now, so things have changed a bit probably. But even back then, it was all pdfs and I rarely used printed media (other than laser printed copies of pdfs). Visiting a library or handling actual printed journals or a photocopier just wasn't a thing. Most of that went away in the nineties.