The editors of a prestigious linguistics journal actually gave Elsevier the middle finger a while back. Here's a good summary: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/

The editors of a prestigious linguistics journal actually gave Elsevier the middle finger a while back. Here's a good summary: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162. Economics and linguistics also publish their own journals which costs some money but significantly less than Elsevier's subscriptions (I believe linguistics' is 300 USD per year). There's probably enough momentum behind middlemen-run journals that prevents this from happening more en masse.