> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live.
Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains.
Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Blackwell? And what about the hundreds of smaller publishers that control major journals? Everyone gives Elsevier shit about suing Sci-Hub, but nobody gives the American Chemical Society shit for suing Sci-Hub. The fact is that people only hold up Elsevier as the great evil because people are tying to over-simplify a complex problem by finding a "single evil", because then they don't have to think about a more complex, nuanced problem.
The fact is that there is a reason that paid journals keep existing, and it's not the profit margins of the Big Four. It's the academic research industry. Every single academic research institute in the world that publishes papers depends on the reputation of journals. Getting your paper published in a "prestigious journal" is literally the only way to progress a researcher's career, and thus get more funding. Without funding, there is no research! And the journals are providing real due diligence happening in the process of creating those journals, and somebody has to pay for that process.
If the paid journals went away tomorrow, researchers would be fucked, and academic institutions would have no idea what to do with themselves. So please stop with this ridiculous meme that Elsevier is The Great Satan holding back science. Sure, they should profit a lot less! But getting rid of them entirely with no system to replace them will be destructive to scientific research.