I completely agree with the views about commercial journals in - Mike Barr's article in the "Newsletter on serials pricing issues" (29 May), - Peter Johnstone's resignation letter as an editor of JPAA (15 Jan), - James Meek's article ("Guardian", 26 May) on the cost of journals (28 May). (The dates refer to "categories" postings.) As Mike Barr pointed out, but James Meek seems not to know, the journals no longer do the work of typesetting papers, so in the Web age the commercial publishers do NOTHING AT ALL. Without meaning to diminish my agreement that we should stop giving our research and our institutions' money to the commercial publishers, I would like to be "advocatus diaboli" on an issue of management. My question is this: Is a commercial (or university) publisher, being outside the academic community, better able to deal with complaints against editors than an academic managing editor can be? An academic editor is subject to other pressures, which may be summed up as "not falling out with colleagues", whereas a commercial manager can be more ruthless in enforcing the rules. I am thinking of complaints of a management rather than intellectual nature, of course. For example, failing to pass papers from authors to referees and the referees' reports back again within a reasonable time. (This has been a real issue for me, but I have no intention of naming names. I would like to see a discussion of professional standards of editing and refereeing sometime, but not on THIS occasion.) The kind of answer that I'm looking for would be an (anonymised) account of some incident where a commercial publisher has dealt with a complaint better or worse than an academic managing editor would. Paul