Why lower quality? The money doesn't go to authors, editors or peer-reviewers.

You're certainly right about authors and peer-reviewers, but are you sure that editors don't get paid with some of that money?

Yes. The "editors" for most such publications do not edit, they make publishing decisions.

Copy-editors are expensive, and paid for by the researchers, not the journals.

> The "editors" for most such publications do not edit, they make publishing decisions.

My spouse is an editor at an academic journal in her field and does some of both. In papers selected for publication, she does exert editorial input. In terms of remuneration, it is a compensated position; but how the money flows between the academic society, the journal and Elsevier, that part is lost on me.

I have published papers in scientific journals. I had to pay page charges to the journal (well, my employer did), but I never directly paid any editor or copy-editor.

Did any copy-editing happen? Frequently it does not. Which is another issue... copy-editing on scientific papers requires major cooperation between the authors and the editor.

Yes, there was copy-editing. After peer-review and acceptance of the paper, the journal would send me marked up versions of the paper ("proofs") that made the paper conform to the journal's style, fixed typos, etc. There were often a couple of iterations concerning these changes. Finally a set of proofs would be accepted, and the paper would be published. Somebody was doing the work of making those proofs, and it wasn't the peer-reviewers. I'm pretty sure that the journals paid people to do that work, and since I was being charged hefty page fees (about $200/page) I suspect some of that money, and perhaps some subscription money, was paying for that work.

Lower system quality? I saw job postings from Elsevier a couple years ago and considered applying. I assume there are other paid staff who contribute to quality of the articles or their delivery as well.