The publishers in this case are the free riders.

They not only get free content from the authors, free labor from the reviewers.

They get to charge the readers but also THE FREAKING AUTHORS for their submissions.

The authors are voluntarily submitting their work and agreeing to any contractual provisions, no?

Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all.

Yes voluntarily.

Much the same way you’ll voluntarily do something when someone who holds a position of power over you asks you to do something.

As numerous other people have pointed out, there is no small amount of career advancement riding on the back of being published in a journal. Until the culture of publish-or-perish can be removed from universities and publishers can be removed from their position as rent-seeking parasites, this dynamic will continue.

Or people can be scientists with day jobs and fund themselves. Clearly there are pros and cons with either approach.

Fundamentally there’s no difference than say bootstrapping a company or seeking investment.

Yes, protection rackets can be described as “voluntary”.

> Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all

Yes, "publish or perish" technically provides two options. ;-)

But it would be nice to see Elsevier and its ilk replaced with true open access journals (without open access fees), and for everything to be available on arxiv.org or similar sites.

It's not like other types of authorship. The researchers who write these papers do not get paid for people obtaining and reading their research. Nor do their peers who review their publications for the journals, they do this as unpaid labor.

The free riders here are the middlemen who take their pound of flesh and hide almost everything behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions.