I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Peer review is not their purview, right? And I don't believe they pay the original authors a portion of each sale. Or that they need much of an advertising budget. What's the cost structure look like for a company like this one?

With all due cynicism, has their been public research on the sort of clever accounting tricks a company with Elsevier's business model must surely be using to keep their profit margin as low as 35% ..?

Lobbying against open access, suing SciHub, threatening authors for self-publishing, yachts,

> I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like.

Me too. Their investor relations report [0] is the best source I know of, but it's pretty vague. I only see breakdowns of revenue, no details regarding operating costs.

PLOS One is transparent regarding their costs though [1]:

- 46% publishing, editorial

- 18% publishing, production

- 15% publishing, technology

- 16% general & admin

- 5% publication fee rebates

[0] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re...

[1] https://plos.org/financial-overview/

"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They run the centralized authority that ultimately says if a .com domain is "legit" or not.

The Registrars like Namecheap and friends are just the messengers authorized to register .com domains into this larger database and they pay Verisign for the privilege to do so.

While it's possible for anyone to go out and stand up their own .COM zone in DNS, any domains created by that registrar don't actually exist in the eyes of the larger Internet and will not work.