The major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in the first place. And lets not even talk about publishers who require exclusive rights, so that technically I can't distribute copies of my own work...
Yes, publishers historically did that. And they printed journals and books, and reprints. But prices were modestly above cost, back in the day. As recently as the 80s. Now, expenses are much lower, and it's all about profiteering.
As I recall, reprints cost on the order of $0.50 each in the early 80s. Based on http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ that's about $1.20 in present dollars. That's a lot less than $30.
Well, what I don't know is what publishers charged third parties for reprints. Or what license fees were for universities etc. As an author, I paid $0.50 per reprint, and I was allowed to give them away. Anyway, I'm confident that there's been huge price inflation.
Yes, it has become less useful. I also read that they only server as a distributor, and that the review process was scaled down, or is nothing from their end. It really is a shame, since most of the research I do is for self-teaching, and sometimes whimsical, so I would never pay to start with. However, I have gone on from the whimsical to the serious, because I did read a free paper.
It's been a while since I've put anything in an Elsevier journal, but iirc they still do the review. They just organize it though, basically the way it works is that they have a pool of reviewers who are known field experts that they choose from. Reviewers are not paid though, so ithat doesn't cost them much.
It used to be that they put a lot more effort into editing and typesetting for print, but they don't do nearly as much nowadays. You just send them your TeX file and if something is wrong they tell you to fix it.
