[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.