The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.

Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.

The fix is not enforcement. It is tenure committees that stop treating impact factors as proxies for researcher quality. Until that changes, any successor recreates the same behavior. The cartel is a symptom.

The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.

Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty.

A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.

Being an extractive business seeking to maintain a chokehold on scientists and their institutions is the least of Elsevier's problems.

More problematic for Elsevier is that the current system of "peer review" may turn out be a failed experiment in the history of science:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has to go into private companies for research already financed by the taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.

I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-status publication venues and Elsevier journals are decidedly second-tier.

> a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate

is this supposed to be read as sarcasm?

amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible

Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a systematized band wagon fallacy.

It relies on the belief that one’s peers in a competitive field, presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it.

And yet, “science progresses one funeral at a time” is an old joke.

“Peer review” is an indication an idea is safe for granting agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth, validity, or utility.