[vitally3643]

That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.

Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?

[MostlyStable]

20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.

They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"

[HPsquared]

They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.

[12_throw_away]

Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.

[JadeNB]

That's only for individual usage, which, I assume, is small potatoes compared to institutional usage. No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy, and neither is it going to boycott Springer, since at least some researchers would put up a fuss—because you don't just need access to lots of papers, sometimes you need access to that specific paper.

[thayne]

Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.

[spwa4]

Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...

[GTP]

Yes, many students and researchers resort to piracy.

[monocasa]

The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.

[leephillips]

Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers:

https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/