It is easy to hate Elsevier, but the real problem is academia. Elsevier is just capitalising on an almost perfect business opportunity - take scientists’ work for free, get other scientists to review it for free then sell it back to all of them. You can’t blame them for doing this, or for being so defensive. We are the fools for participating in this racket.

We need a hard fork. Large prestigious academic institutions should band together and decide not to publish in Elsevier journals, that’s the only way forward. Funding agencies should also be on board.