If you don't want to defend Elsevier, then don't. The research was paid for with our tax dollars. The public has a right to read it. The academics who write and review the papers are not paid by Elsevier. The only value Elsevier provides is choosing which papers to accept, and organizing physical printing of the articles. A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with some PDFs... and in some fields, that's what's starting to happen.

> A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with some PDFs.

This is a little naive. Running a good journal takes a lot of time and effort (not to mention a little bit of money).

Are you familiar with http://www.nature.com/news/leading-mathematician-launches-ar...

I'm not saying that it can't be done. But I think it is an open question whether we can move to a model where all journals work this way. It inevitably means academics will have to spend time and money on things that they didn't previously have to spend time and money on.

Academics already have to keep up with the literature in their field. It is an important part of being a researcher. You don't want to spend your time on something someone has already done, and you want to cite prior work.

In practice, paper selection is done in a bottom-up fashion already. An individual lab usually decides whether a paper is worth publishing. A minor conference decides which of the papers submitted to it are worth featuring. Bigger conferences look at the results of the minor ones. And so on. There is not a guy at Elsevier whose job it is to read the entire internet. Like the rest of their business, it's parasitic off the publicly funded university research system.

I know how the system works, I'm an academic myself.

If you really think that no-one employed by journals is actually doing any work, I'm not sure what to say. The reality is that editing and publishing are time consuming, and that if this work is not being doing by paid employees of journals, it's going to have to be done by someone else.

Paper selection is not really the issue. That is largely done by (unpaid) reviewers in any case. It's everything else that goes into running a journal that's potentially going to give rise to problems.

Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible for a group of academics to get together and run a journal entirely by themselves. I think it's less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals. It's very easy to confuse work that's easy with work that's quick. Yes, it's easy to set up a website with a few PDFs on it, and it's easy to forward papers to reviewers, and it's easy to come up with a LaTeX stylesheet for papers, etc. etc. But maintaining all of that stuff and keeping it running smoothly eats up a lot of time, even though there's nothing fundamentally difficult about it.

> I think it's less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals

Yes, it's less clear because we don't have that kind of system yet to see. We need to try it. Perhaps we'll find we do not need all current traditional journals. Perhaps we'll be fine with online archive for all academic publications and a good search engine.

Well, I'm really defending the rule of law, not Elsevier. I fully support the current trend towards open access journals. But open access journals don't involve systematic copyright infringement.

I wouldn't fault an opinionated blog post for trying to make a persuasive argument. Why should the author pretend to be a pseudo-objective newspaper journalist and mix in Elsevier's talking points? This is seems to be written with the reasonable assumption that the reader is aware of the academic journal publishing reform movement and its opponents.

> If you want a sandwich, you have to pay for it first... Not all businesses are rackets.

A more accurate analogy might be:

You are a small sandwich manufacturer. Supermarkets are the only shops in town. The supermarket won't pay you, the sandwich manufacturer, to stock your goods. In fact, they may charge you for the privilege. Or they may charge their hungry customers. Or both.