Note that the more you know about them, the worse it gets. I wrote a report for Education International last year as part of a global campaign against Elsevier. https://www.ei-ie.org/en/detail/16061/elsevier-the-price-of-...

You make it sound so easy, but if it was, don't you think people will have done it already? Monopolies, vendor lock-in, lobbying, divide-and-conquer approaches, all make moving away to a better system quite difficult.

Public funding agencies should be prohibited from giving away funds and copyrights to private entities with 30%+ profit margins. I cannot understand why this is legal.

I hear you. But they aren’t going to turn around and become the publisher we want, that is a fantasy. They have no incentive to change.

It isn’t easy for academia to help itself (for once), but it is the only viable solution imho.

Elsevier is the bouncer to a trendy club. People flock outside, just because they know that the bouncer rejects 92% of the submitted articles (that's the rate for Nature i think). I think an open access publisher must create this artificial scarcity in order to build reputation. In fact i think they have to advertise it. They 'll also need a massive promotion campaign to attract attentin from authors.