As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that wasn't apparent before.
Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there are. Is research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will posting preprints or research blogging fix everything? Nope.
If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.
Information and analytical services that support researchers and clinicians is the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for many years now, and these businesses only get even more valuable as more and more content is available openly.
At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end services that scientific societies, funders, researchers, and their institutions need to keep the system running so they can focus on their research.
What are these systems?
Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to support the mission of the society - advocating on policy issues important to their research community - through the society journal. Elsevier makes running the journal financially sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers, attracting and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics complaints, and providing a cheap platform.
Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in alignment with the funders mission, not just by conferring status, but with more advanced ways of understand the broader impact of a work. Elsevier (including me personally) has worked to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the impact factor: https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics...
Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase their work, recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for tenure & decide who should get it.
After spending years working on projects with these different groups, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of how everything works & what the levers of change actually are. Happy to discuss with anyone!