elsevier wants whatever financial benefits they can squeeze out. when someone copy pastes someone elses work and starts charging a fee for use that is beyond plaigarism.
when someone submits a work and collectively elsevier edits that work, and originator ~agrees~ to the revisions, this is called collaboration and implies partnership in a derived work, thus elsevier goes from something they dont own, to forcing collaborative ownership of something that is not thiers. this is how you leverage works that are meant to be freely shared, into being something to commoditize for private gain, in exchange for allowing you to publish on thier platform. this is not how a career path through science works.
it seems my path of molecular biology genetics and virology are not most career paths, and have not needed elsevier for dissemination of manuscript and prepublication. I remember it being quite a concern when elsevier started gobbling up everything, and we had to go back to email or paper in hand until the mailing list was sorted out. nowadays out of security concerns i have to SSL directly with oversight.
