[jf]

"I love my library and the other libraries that I visit frequently, and my blood boils when I see a library being overcharged."

Given the topic and my love for Knuth, I went into this paper ready to agree with him. But Knuth does a great job at stating his case.

This sentence caught my eye: "Elsevier, however, ignored my letter and did not reply" - who in their right mind would ignore a letter from Knuth?!

[IanCal]

Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money.

This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes.

But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding.

What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want.

Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.

[mschuster91]

> Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money.

Because the broken rest of the system (i.e. financials tied to "how many papers did you get published") incentivizes everyone to keep the status quo.

The entire academia publishing clusterfuck needs massive government intervention to dismantle.

[oaiey]

For Elsevier, Knuth was just an editor of a Journal at peak. He is not a legend for them just one of hundreds and thousands of legends they manage.

Like a (legendary) middle manager which is in the company since the start and built it up but does not agree with the current business goals of the company. We know what happens with these managers.

[riedel]

They don't talk to anyone unless many libraries stop paying [0]. I wonder however if those open access deals will mean the death blow to printed copies and classical libraries.

[0] https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier