It's not just about the costs to Elsevier. It's about the costs of keeping information a secret that could have a much greater financial and societal impact if it were unleashed.
This is the age of the individual contributor. Open Source has taught us all about the power of appealing to and capturing the output of people working at home, in small groups, at small startups, etc.
So this isn't so much about recapturing the piece of a fixed pie that Elsevier takes. This is about making an incredibly larger pie by opening the information up to a wider audience and allowing us to compound the benefits in a much larger ecosystem.
Exactly! The real issue here is opportunity cost. Yes, we could have a much cheaper academic publishing system if we did it without the paywalls and the profiteering corporations. But that savings are as nothing compared with all the new application avenues that will open up when research is freely available.
This is the age of the individual contributor. Open Source has taught us all about the power of appealing to and capturing the output of people working at home, in small groups, at small startups, etc.
So this isn't so much about recapturing the piece of a fixed pie that Elsevier takes. This is about making an incredibly larger pie by opening the information up to a wider audience and allowing us to compound the benefits in a much larger ecosystem.