[consp]

Elsevier's profit was almost a billion pounds in 2017. They are the last people to complain about margins or cost/benefits.

[rocqua]

They post a profit or about 33% according to others in this thread. This means they still have ~2 billion pounds in actual operating costs. Not that I support the current model, but that work still needs to be done, and it seems naive to expect it to be done for free / substantially less.

I wonder how far the 'fee per published article' gets to covering bare costs for e.g. the journal Nature.

[consp]

I highly doubt most of the operating costs come from the journals. Considering there are far more people working for other publications in the Elsevier company. Usually the publications with high turnaround have low profit or break even, and I do not think the journals are among those and actually raise the profit margin substantially.

But then, I can't back this up with numbers as they do not publish specifics...