You are correct: I am even less of an Elsevier fan that you, I'll warrant, but even their absurd prices "only" constitute on the order of 2% of the total cost o

You are correct: I am even less of an Elsevier fan that you, I'll warrant, but even their absurd prices "only" constitute on the order of 2% of the total cost of research. But of course this makes it all the more ridiculous that we allow them to lock up the results of research. The issue here isn't just that Open Access is more economically efficient (although it is, by a factor of 3-5). The real issue is that there's so much can't do at any price with the current system or paywalls. If the Web as a whole were paywalled as academic papers are, we'd have no Google for example, because it wouldn't be possible to spider. We can't even SAY what the advantages to ubiquitous open access will be yet -- they haven't been invented, any more than spidering web-search engines were invented before the Web.