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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
---
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.
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_...
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