[Udo]

The academic publishing industry in general, and Elsevier specifically, are a curse upon academia and human progress in general. But they only have power if we give it to them. There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos.

Of course, an intermediate horror scenario will then come true if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. However, that could finally push us over the edge to rethink intellectual property timeframes.

[zozbot234]

> There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos.

This will happen a lot quicker if more people work to improve FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interop, Reusability) of content and information that's outside proprietary silos already. Whether old content that has become legally available due to its age, or content that's been published openly in the first place. That's what it would take for people to ignore the silos outright.

> ...if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll.

Most large publishers are pretty much IP trolls anyway. The incentives inherent in IPR regulation, combined with large monopoly power, push them towards that model.

[jhbadger]

The problem (at least for me) is that science is inherently collaborative and most authors on a paper have no say on where a paper is submitted to. Yes, I can say, "We shouldn't publish this in an Elsevier journal because of all the shady things they've done to increase the costs to libraries while providing little added value" and they'll say "The paper is about X. Everybody who works on X publishes in Elsevier's Journal of X. If we don't publish there nobody who works in the field will know about our work".