This is an interesting perspective. For a few years, I've worked as a volunteer to process authors' PDF files for some larger conferences to place on our open access site. My job is to add a conference banner to the top of the first page, add PDF metadata, and re-stamp the page numbers at the bottom.
Having a dedicated editor would definitely improve the quality of the results. You wouldn't believe what authors do to their PDF files before submission. I've seen papers that center an 8x11" copy of their paper in the middle of an A4 canvas. I've seen papers where all the pages are just giant bitmaps that show the paper (presumably to avoid plagiarism). I've seen papers that have incorrectly-embedded fonts, so after our pipeline, we didn't notice that all the text in figures was replaced by Chinese characters (sorry!). I've seen papers that have permuted font maps, so even though the paper looks correct on the screen, the letters on the OCR layer don't match what you see, making the work impossible to find on Google.
Not to complain against the authors. We all have to break out our LaTeX tricks minutes before the submission deadline to fix that weird compile bug. My point is that it's important to have _some_ oversight. It's not enough to just zip up all the PDF files and call that "open access."
Having a dedicated editor would definitely improve the quality of the results. You wouldn't believe what authors do to their PDF files before submission. I've seen papers that center an 8x11" copy of their paper in the middle of an A4 canvas. I've seen papers where all the pages are just giant bitmaps that show the paper (presumably to avoid plagiarism). I've seen papers that have incorrectly-embedded fonts, so after our pipeline, we didn't notice that all the text in figures was replaced by Chinese characters (sorry!). I've seen papers that have permuted font maps, so even though the paper looks correct on the screen, the letters on the OCR layer don't match what you see, making the work impossible to find on Google.
Not to complain against the authors. We all have to break out our LaTeX tricks minutes before the submission deadline to fix that weird compile bug. My point is that it's important to have _some_ oversight. It's not enough to just zip up all the PDF files and call that "open access."