Then Elsevier should be just fine when it loses this part of its business.
The company came to be so dominant because their strategy of vertical integration is effective and repeatable. Identify a market of valuable information; build tools to collect & collate that information; build tools for searching through the information; build tools for adding annotations or otherwise improving the value of the information; build tools to enable people to provide information directly through the platform.
They've basically repeated this pattern for science, medicine, legal, and insurance industries. So much so that it's really impossible to pry them out of a space because they get so tightly integrated that they actually become indistinguishable from the market.
I'm not favoring reed elsevier here, just pointing out that their dominance is very well established and isn't going to be easy to bring them down.
To guard this data to the point they were willing to throw Aaron Swartz in jail for 35 years is beyond reprehensible. It's simply abhorrent the way they have acted as gatekeepers to this kind of knowledge.
They are responsible for slowing things down. Not speeding them up. These gatekeepers are holding us back. Lives could be saved. Millions of them. This data is a benefit to humanity as a whole and it should be treated as such.