If you've worked as a paid employee for an academic journal, what do you actually do?

Question

Academics write papers, perform editorial tasks, and do peer review. Authors have to read and follow each journal's Byzantine formatting requirements themselves. Most other tasks seem to be automated, for example, in most journals I submit to I'm asked to suggest peer reviewers and provide emails. Most requests I get to do peer review seem to be from automated systems.

What exactly is left? Does Elsevier have any employees? Or, as I suspect, is the whole company just a donkey chewing a carrot somewhere in the Netherlands?

Answer 1

What exactly is left? Does Elsevier have any employees?

Elsevier certainly has employees. According to their website, the company has 8.700 employees, most of them in Europe and the US (which is genuinely more than I anticipated before googling). Clearly not all of these 8.700 will be directly involved in handling papers.

I guess your deeper question is - what do journal editors (not the academic editors) actually do? My understanding from having lunch with such a person at a conference once is that it's a fairly heterogenous job - ensuring that decisions of the Editor-in-Chief(s) are in line with Elsevier policy (or finding a new editorial board in the rare cases that the existing one disappears), setting up and managing the submission system, networking with researchers like me at conferences, networking with library staff to ensure that these sweet, sweet subscriptions remain in place, collecting data to report to various indices, and naturally keeping one's eye open for potential new journals. And of course handling many emails (technical issues, complaints, etc.).

Generally, a single person will be handling a range of journals in the same broad technical area, since networking for Applied IT journal A will go hand in with networking for Applied IT journal B and C. Often (but not always), editors seem to hold a PhD in a field related to the journals they are handling.

Answer 2

There are plenty of roles outside of the basic reviewer/editor positions at a publisher. Even ignoring the necessary but non-publication related jobs (like lawyers, accountants, IT) there are often a boatload of employees handling copy-editing, marketing, customer service, and author support. Plus there can sometimes be a large number of assistant editors or other low level administrative people working to process submissions. And, of course, some editors are paid employees.

Now that's not to say that any of those people are good that their jobs or that any of them make the publication process smoother. But they are there.

Answer 3

Looking through the detailed answer linked by Anonymous Physicist one can estimate the time and work by journal staff. I will make my estimates based on my experience with journals in mathematics.

First part for the journal staff is the initial check. For most journals this is fully automated, so zero hours per new paper submitted but somebody needs to have written and programmed this at some point.

Next part for the journal staff is copy editing and typesetting. As the author is required to submit a latex file using the style files of the journal the journal mostly needs to check whether the author did that and proof read whether they changed any formatting in any significant way. A few hours of work if done properly.

Final part for the journal staff is publication. If the journal is only published online this is just a push of a button. If it is still printed on paper there can be quite a bit of work here. In that case the previous step is also more complicated because multiple papers need to be arranged into a single paper volume.

All in all there is not much work per submitted paper. A bigger chunk of work comes from the marketing side convincing university libraries that they need all these expensive prescription. You also need some general IT staff to keep the website up and running and an HR department.