A couple very rough estimates retrieved quickly in 5 minutes from official Elsevier data.
RELX, the company which owns Elsevier has a capitalization of 56£ billion. Elsevier publishes around 600.000 articles per year and the average price per submission is 2350£ (simple average over submission price in every journal, not counting amount of articles published.)
The average subscription price for each journal is 3524£, I'll assume 600.000 subscription just to have a number.
This means that research institutes and universities overall would pay around 3.5£ billion to Elsevier every year. By saving that money, we could collectively buy Elsevier in less than 10 years.
Maybe we should set up an association, every time you pay money to Elsevier you'd have to make a donation to such association with the objective of buying the majority of RELX.
This would be an economically sound decision.
@rastinza By God, you’ve solved it! Let’s just buy Elsevier! It’s so obvious!
@openwarfare I mean, this is obviously unfeasible; but seeing how much money the scientific community is just throwing into the garbage is ashaming.
Getting that grant money is difficult!
