I don’t want to defend Elsevier’s business practices, but I’m confused by the way some of the numbers are used in the argument against. I understand if the OP is too busy with the legal work right now to respond, but I’d be curious to know whether I’m missing something.
India has 30x the financial issues with the academic publishing oligopoly as the US
The olipology has such high pricing power and Elsevier has 37% operating profit margin
Take both of these numbers at face value—let’s say that Indian researchers face effective costs 30x higher than a US researcher would (and there’s no developing-countries discount like there is in pharma), and that Elsevier spends 63% of revenues on operations and collects 37% as operating profit.
This means that a hypothetical non-profit publisher operating in the same way would give Indian researchers 18.9x the effective costs that US researchers pay now. Or, if it were operating in the same way and collecting zero revenue, it would need to raise £1.6 billion/year to fund operations. (I’m ignoring second-order effects of lower price on demand and costs.)
I would guess that the “Elsevier, but 0% margin and costs 37% less” would not be tolerable to most critics. (Certainly, it’s far from satisfying to me!) So it seems like the actual goal state is not just “Elsevier is less evil” but also has to include one or more of:
Elsevier significantly reduces operating costs
Elsevier’s operating costs are supported by people other than institutions+researchers (e.g. by government taxes on all taxpayers)
Elsevier restructures costs so that institutions+researchers in developing countries are subsidized by institutions+researchers in developed countries.
I’m curious which of these options are endorsed by Connor_Flexmann and other critics.
(I think that #1 is actually the most promising for reducing costs to researchers worldwide. Finding a way to reduce operating costs by 20% and give half to the publisher as additional margin seems like it should be significantly easier than convincing them to voluntarily give back 20% of profits—though the cost reduction to customers is the same in each case!)
I give the WHO kudos for picking omicron instead of nu. (Actually, I’m pretty shocked that they did something this common-sensical, and notice that I am surprised.) I spent Friday morning (= Thursday evening, US time) talking out loud with colleagues about the new nu variant and after like two attempts to clarify what the f—I actually meant, multiple people independently joked that it was so bad we should just skip nu and go to omicron.
If you’ve only ever discussed it in text, you’re underestimating how bad it is to use “nu” as an adjective in verbal conversation.