>Why is someone getting stuff produced at tax-payers expense, peer-reviewed for free, and charging for it, and what's stopping this from being overturned? They

>Why is someone getting stuff produced at tax-payers expense, peer-reviewed for free, and charging for it, and what's stopping this from being overturned? They're not. Elsevier doesn't produce the research. They filter it to give you the good bits. Historically, the value they've provided is 1) to ensure quality (i.e. guarantee readers not just any crank can publish a paper and waste your time, guarantee authors that you'll be published alongside good stuff, so people are less likely to skip over your work), 2) to coordinate operations (recruit authors, recruit appropriate reviewers, negotiate with printers, general SG&A), 3) manage physical printing and distribution. Arguably, 3 is now somewhat commoditized because distribution is mostly online. Costs have been driven down on 2 because of a glut of PhD's and the general demand for prestige signalling in academia. I'm genuinely not sure how relevant 1 is. I could imagine either that it's entirely replicable because 2 is now cheap, or that it's the kind of thing you don't know you care about til it's gone the way no one ever said "I love that my local store only sells genuine and high quality goods," but now people complain about how it's tough to know what you're getting from Amazon.