Academic publication - a nasty troll

There are not that many publishers for scientific journals. Elsevier is one of the biggies and it is turning nasty. From The Washington Post:

How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research
One of the world's largest academic publishers has launched a wide-ranging takedown spree, demanding that several different universities take down their own scholars' research.

Elsevier is a commercial firm that publishes some of the leading journals in many academic fields. In recent weeks, it has sent takedown notices to the academic social media network Academia.edu, as well as to the University of Calgary, the University of California-Irvine, and Harvard University.

In these cases, Elsevier is within its legal rights to demand the material be taken down. The firm often requires researchers to surrender their copyrights in a paper as a condition of publishing it. But the takedown campaign goes against a long-standing industry practice in which journal publishers look the other way when academics post their own work.

Elsevier's new hard-line posture is likely to intensify a debate over the future of academic publishing. Thanks to the Internet, academics no longer need traditional academic publishers to distribute their research to the world in paper form. And a growing number of researchers are beginning to wonder if legacy publishers are becoming more of an obstacle than an aid to distributing their work. Outrage over Elsevier's takedown spree could intensify their search for alternative models that allow academics to share their work directly�without companies like Elsevier taking such a big cut.

Double-edged sword here -- the market for these Journals is small so there is no real economy of scale. Submitting each paper for peer-review is expensive so the cost to the journal is a double whammy. Copyright protection is Elsevier's way to secure the revenue stream. There are some open-access academic journals but some of them have been PWND with fake papers. Their peer review is weak (but getting better -- PLOS one is a good one and a frequent read for me).