The same is true for LexisNexus.
They certainly do not deserve to be paid for things they didn't do, nor a perpetual monopoly on others' work, simply because they've managed to lock-in their customers for historical reasons.
Rent-seeking is rent-seeking, and is bad for society.
charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published,
As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published.
You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want.
If the researchers don't want their research behind the paywall, they are not forced into the transaction. They must be finding the value-add of the "peer-review and publish" significant enough to give up publishing rights elsewhere.
Some journals have paid editorial staff however, that do useful things like copyediting. In exchange, the public has to pay $15-$30/ea (or whatever, it depends on the journal and field) for access to your papers; probably forever.
It's a rent seeking industry that would make even the the music recording companies blush. Yes, they do some useful facilitation, but it's not commensurate with the (completely externalized) cost.
Peer review is important. It will not stop being important, but unfortunately the service of peer review is currently only being offered by mostly for-profit organizations, which is the primary problem.
My pet peeve when downloading articles from journals is that it is a chain of needless HTTP redirects and elaborate cookies. If you are accessing the network from an approved IP address, is all that really necessary? Why can't it be a simple direct download? Answer: Because they've commercialized the process of reading publicly-funded research results. And with that comes the usual mindless hoop-jumping for even the simplest things.
Many investigators will just post a copy on their lab's website anyway. And that's the link that they will often give to students who need a copy of the paper. So the whole scheme of commercializing the publishing of noncommercial research just looks silly.
Don't question it, just follow along.
Even Nature, one of the most awesome-est journals in the world, demands certain restrictions, like not publishing in another journal. They don't want to do all the work of vetting the article only to find out that it's also in Joe's Fishing And Particle Physics Papers.
IME, those organizations generally don't provide the peer-reviewers and the peer-reviewers aren't paid.
How is that a valuable service? Millions of people do that for free on the web every day. Hell, I'm doing it right now.
So it is a valuable service to provide.
There seem to be two issues here that are being conflated.
The first is the value of peer review. I don't agree with the arguments that having a select group of people, who are experts in their fields, reviewing papers is a bad thing. Nor do I think that opening it up will result in anything other than a terrible amount of noise.
The second argument is over the necessity of for-pay journals. Here, I think there could be a lot of work... if the new journal still provides the same amount of review and scrutiny as the current ones.
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