Among the reasons for-profit research publishers can make a motza is not having to pay for in-puts – including peer-reviewing  

Balazs Aczel and Barnabas Szasz (both Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary) and Alex I Holcombe (Uni Sydney) used public data to estimate researchers’ time and salary-based contributions to the peer-review system.

They found peer-reviewing took 100 million hours in 2020 with estimated monetary values (in US dollars) of $1.5bn for work by US reviewers, $600m for researchers in China and $400m for work in the UK.

They suggest ways to make the process more efficient but acknowledge “peer review labour sticks out as a large cost that is not being addressed systematically by publishers.”

Funny that – given for-profit research publishers make a motza. The STM division of RELX (where its journal giant subsidiary Elsevier sits) had an operating profit in the six months to June of A$732m (CMM August 6).