Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier (opens in new tab)

There's more to it than that. Elsevier etc are just bleeding out the academic publishing business. Just like Alden Global Capital has been bleeding out The Denver Post and many other newspapers.

The proposition is still ok value if not too expensive - collated and vetted research reviews are highly valuable. Such as some journals and annals.

However, preventing anyone else from creating them or running their own analysis via exclusivity and access pricing is just selfish and stifling.

This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for review in the first place, manage the review process so that you don't have nasty, unhelpful reviews or personal vendettas getting exercised, manage ethical concerns, deal with authorship disputes, etc, and that's just the review piece of things. There's a whole information infrastructure behind the scenes making sure that once something is published that it can be found, indexed, searched for, aggregated by author, connected to the data and code and protocols and other entities that it mentions... I mean, I've been at this for 8 years and there's still so much I don't know.

All that just to make the point that the value proposition is still very much there, though I'll agree publishers could do more to make this apparent.

Added value:

"The Lancet finds itself connected to... global arms trade: a trade that inflicts physical and social harm in the poorest and least stable regions. Since 2003, The Lancet's owner and publisher, Reed Elsevier, has organised some of the world's largest arms" https://t.co/rIbch7S6dy

If publishers play hardball, no researcher will ever work for them as authors, referees or editors. Or they come down to more reasonable prices and perhaps reduce their 40% profits to ones in line with other industries?

additionally I came to think that keeping anyone not associated with academia from, err, academia would be on purpose, and the strikes are just increasing the pressure.

Overview of distribution of costs by 5 main publishers -- Elsevier share is larger than all other 4 large publishers combined:

https://oa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/B14-12-Lidiia-Bor...