What's the Difference Between a Cockroach and Science Publisher Elsevier?

As near as I can determine, it is that cockroaches are far less expensive.

The rentier capitalism of Elsevier, in which they have the articles peer reviewed, and pay the reviewers nothing or next to nothing, charge the authors to publish the articles, and then charge (a lot) so that people can read the articles, is an exercise in parasitism, and the editors at NeuroImage and Imaging Neuroscience have resigned en masse in response to their rapacious greed.

More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May. Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copy editing, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs. Andrew Davis, Elsevier’s vice-president of corporate communications, says that NeuroImage’s fee is less than that of the nearest comparable journal in its field, and that the publisher’s APCs are “set in line with our policy [of] providing above average quality for below average price”.

Lets look at the charges:

• Copy editing? For an article, well under $100.
• Typesetting?  Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Archiving? Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Indexing? Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Peer review?  Most peer reviewers are not paid or a very small fee? 
• Editorial services?  That should mostly be covered peer review, so it's a bullsh%$ profit center.
• Marketing and Administration?  Again a bullsh%$ profit center.

Publishers have introduced APCs — part of a pay-to-publish model — as an alternative to pay-to-read subscriptions as journals increasingly become freely accessible, and researchers typically pay APCs from their grant funds. Journal APCs vary, typically depending on factors such as the publisher’s size, the proportion of papers sent for peer review and metrics such as impact factor, as well as whether they employ in-house editors and press officers. The Lancet Neurology, published by Elsevier, has an APC of $6,300; the fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690; and Human Brain Mapping, published by Wiley, charges $3,850. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of Nature Neuroscience and of Springer Nature.)

Pay to read has stopped working because researchers are increasingly unwilling to pay to read the journals or to put their articles behind paywalls.

Additionally, Sci-Hub, which has made millions of articles that were previously behind paywalls freely available, has made the old business model unsustainable, though the be fair, the ever increasing levies charged by the for-profit publishers likely made something like Sci-Hub inevitable.

………

The editors decided to set up an open-access journal with MIT Press, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Ted Gibson, who sits on MIT Press’s editorial board and is an editor of its cognitive-science journal Open Mind, looks forward to hosting the new title. “These editors have done it the right way. I think it’s a slow process but eventually more scientists will resign from the profit-oriented journals,” Gibson says.

The journal move echoes a 2019 case, in which the editorial board of an Elsevier scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — resigned in protest over the publisher’s open-access policies, including the journal’s APCs. The researchers launched a free-to-read journal with MIT Press called Quantitative Science Studies, with the same editorial board.

The for profit model of academic publishing is consuming itself through its own unbridled greed.

The current IP regime, particularly copyright, serves no one but the gate-keepers who contribute nothing to society.