Before MIT I was briefly set to sign a contract with Elsevier. So glad I pulled out in time. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but they were pure corporate poison.

I met another author some years later who published a technical book with them. It went to press full of typesetting errors and mistakes. He found evidence in files that the proofreading had been outsourced to India. They wanted to charge him to fix the mess they'd made.

When it comes to scientific research, Elsevier are trying to build a monopoly. They convinced me of the necessity of SciHub. I always tell students to have nothing to do with them.

Far better (an incentive for open-access publication) would be if Elsevier-published articles "didn't count" for funding & tenure decisions.

This is the critical step. I don't know who will bell the cat though!

A number of European universities have also cut ties with Elsevier - https://www.enago.com/academy/german-universities-cancel-els....

Practically, then, how do researchers access Elsevier articles? I work in big pharma, and if there's an article I don't have access to, I just request it through our information services office, and it is emailed to me almost instantly. Presumably, that is charged to my department. Is there a similar system in place at MIT? Does it come out of research budgets now?

Maybe you left out "legally" from the end of the first sentence, but the obvious answer is Sci Hub.

For now, if you do not want to join some sort of samizdat group, you can request them from the institution that did the research. Sci-hub allows professors to avoid the hassle of having to manage requests for their articles in this age without secretaries.