As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends it

Current grad students sometimes ask why I never publish. Mostly laziness, to be sure. But also, if I’m going to spend months polishing up a paper, why on earth would I subject it to the academic publishing fiasco when I’m not an academic?

This is the problem with monopolistic for-profit publishers. They have little incentive to fulfill their structural role once they don't need to compete for subscriptions. Researchers are still the heart of peer review but our time and funding are squeezed and parasitized from every direction. Billion dollar publishers who contribute almost nothing to the scientific process are carried on the backs of researchers making $60k/year or less who could be making double in industry.

Much progress has been made in spite of elsevier. If the money they effectively take away from science were instead put into grants to fund more of this kind of detective work everything would be better.