I don't think it's correct that professors don't do their own diagrams and typesetting for academic works. Sometimes they do. The complaints I hear are that the

I don't think it's correct that professors don't do their own diagrams and typesetting for academic works. Sometimes they do. The complaints I hear are that the publisher screwed up the equations and introduced errors, not that they thoughtfully corrected their work and enhanced it. When diagrams and typesetting are needed though, this is the perfect task for the students to attend to. I'm seeing this right now in the free online classes at Coursera and Udacity - teachers publish notes in lectures and students are providing transcriptions, translations, diagrams, deeper explanations, and overall creating massive improvement on the originals, in many cases creating an online textbook in pdf or wiki format.