Elsevier defends its value after Open Access disputes

"Blah, blah, blah, peer review, blah, blah, economics, blah, blah, blah, innovation, blah, blah, blah."

Seriously, I don't see anything in there that sells me that Elsevier is adding significant value to the academic publishing world. So they reject a lot of stuff? An arXiv overlay journal can easily have its editors click a button to reject a submission, but the paper is still there on arXiv if people still want to read it for whatever reason. As far as that goes, an overlay journal could easily support crowd-sourced ranking based on votes, tags, etc., and let users set filters to define the bar a paper has to reach before they see it. And if you support discussions around each paper, you encourage post-publication review.

"But, wait" you're saying... "somebody would have to write that software". Yes, technically correct, although there are open source platforms already that could provide a very significant foundation to build on. And if a major initiative were launched to build a standard, open source platform for building overlay journals, I feel highly confident that a number of contributors would jump in. At the very least, I'd volunteer for that myself.

"But what about the marketing that Elsevier does", you say.

I say, a scientific journal should receive respect and credibility based on its contents, not the marketing spend of the publisher. If anything, reading the bits about marketing in this article leave me with an even less favorable view of Elsevier (if that is possible).