I do not know the case of every editor for all journals. Just sharing my direct knowledge as an employee of a large not for profit society. We did indeed pre pandemic have ~100 editors coming in the office not for free. THey now work remote not for free along with others around the world that are paid.
Not you but just in general sometimes HN is hard if you post an observation or direct experience that is not in the hivemind. You get downvoted for things even though they are well reasoned and true. I personally don't care if journals get disrupted there are indeed a lot of problems. I work in tech, I will have another job tomorrow. I was just making the point that we don't just have free scientists doing work and then upload PDFs to the internet and charge for them. If that was the case we could have journals for a few hundred dollars a month rather than the 10s of millions we spend. I also too think we are honest, do good work, are thrifty, and provide a good service.
If you work for APS, then you ought to be aware that APS is quite exceptional if it pays editors for overseeing the peer-review process. I am fortunate to work in a field where our main journals are still issued by non-profit learned societies, not gigantic corporations like Elsevier, and still the only people who get paid are the proofreaders and typesetters – the editors and peer reviewers have to work for free.
Here are our financials it is public. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...
Not you but just in general sometimes HN is hard if you post an observation or direct experience that is not in the hivemind. You get downvoted for things even though they are well reasoned and true. I personally don't care if journals get disrupted there are indeed a lot of problems. I work in tech, I will have another job tomorrow. I was just making the point that we don't just have free scientists doing work and then upload PDFs to the internet and charge for them. If that was the case we could have journals for a few hundred dollars a month rather than the 10s of millions we spend. I also too think we are honest, do good work, are thrifty, and provide a good service.