The Encyclopedia of the Roman Army

[Sean Manning]

I think that the difficulty has always been that peer-review and editing are volunteer work, and sometimes people take on more than they can handle. All it takes is one late editor, or one serious disagreement about changes, to block a whole volume.

My difficulty lies in seeing how academic publishers think this is in any way ethical.

Mike Bishop

It certainly assumes a world where all the learned are paid to, among other things, edit and peer-review new scholarship. If that world ever existed, it certainly has been gone for fifty years or more. (Proposals that authors should pay the few thousand dollars that it costs to edit, format, and distribute a journal article, because obviously everyone who publishes scholarly articles has an employer who will refund their publishing costs, face the same problem).

Edit: Robert's point that many academic publishers don't have enough money to pay anyone but the printer and the book designer also matches my experience.