For institutions, it’s that Elsevier gives access to some of the papers their researchers need. The question is then how Elsevier got the papers and I think the

For institutions, it’s that Elsevier gives access to some of the papers their researchers need. The question is then how Elsevier got the papers and I think there’s a bunch of parts to it. Firstly, it can be by providing a good service. Before the war, most papers were published by learned societies and such societies tended to not be very good publishers – they would be slow with long backlogs and unable to publish the volume of papers scientists wanted published at the time. By providing a faster service they could get papers. Second it can be by offering a service at all. If you have a Springer journal and an Elsevier journal for some field, they can both get papers because researchers need to publish to advance their careers and one journal will not be big enough for all the papers in that field Third can be from being a preferred choice by being prestigious, which can matter even without impact factor arithmetic – hiring committees made of peers can still know which journals in the field are more prestigious / harder to be published in, and take that into account when hiring. It’s not totally clear to me how to become prestigious. One way is by inertia – if you were prestigious before you probably still are. Something some publishers (Pergamon Press, but maybe others too?) did was owning and dining prominent scientists to get them to sign exclusive contracts to edit new journals. Perhaps this association via the editorial board could improve the journal’s prestige or otherwise get desirable papers in. It does seem true to me that scientific publishers used to provide a pretty valuable service, and I think if one were in a government looking at all the government money going to the journals via universities, one might be able to feel that the improvement to the rate of scientific exchange was worth it. It feels that today, a lot of that value comes from various kinds of inertia/lock-in: Elsevier has the papers and scientists must publish in Elsevier journals to advance their careers, which maintains the prestige of those journals and means the publisher continues to have the papers.