It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.

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KingMob 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.)

In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work.

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That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this.

I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.

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D-Machine 10 hours ago | parent [-]

You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs.

But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting.

Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009

https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-autom...

https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/

https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_...

	▲	KingMob 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I don't think it's "very obvious", nor do I think "it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting". I guess I'm not seeing the evidence the same way. --- I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant one with good numbers is the svpow.com link. The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial and production". That includes more than type-setting, so it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and whether it's overpriced or not. The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say "Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is different, like complaining about coffee shops because the vending machine is cheaper. The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting. --- The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to break out type-setting. My $0.02, anyway.