Scientific publishers are basically the outsourced HR department of universities. Modern academic fields are too sprawling for professors to understand everythi

Scientific publishers are basically the outsourced HR department of universities. Modern academic fields are too sprawling for professors to understand everything that's going on in their field. The members of a hiring committee or even a tenure committee often just don't really understand the work of the people they are evaluating. So they have to rely on journals, and metrics like how many popular publications people have. It's a valuable service to do this evaluation work for academics. It's just a shame that the way we pay for it is to lock up research behind a paywall. But "publishing a PDF" is just not a very hard problem to solve at all. That isn't the difficult problem that Elsevier is solving. They are solving the difficult problem of filtering out which academics to hire.