Its like if we paid taxes to build and maintain roads and bridges, only to have the constructor give the rights of the finished result to a toll-both company in order so they could evaluate and rate how good the individual construction workers are and make it easier to promote and hire them in the future. It make no sense for any practical profession to behave like this, and yet thats how academia has operated for ages. It is time that the public get what it paid for.

Elsevier will happily publish your papers as open access (for a small service fee).

Basically, over the years, they acquired a bunch of academic publishers that were effectively not-for-profit. And since, they've been raising prices. Harvesting market position.

Sure, that's not illegal. But it's arguably immoral.