What is up with Elsevier?

“Whether you like it or not, Elsevier matters in the dissemination of research in Economics. By far the largest player in the field, it enjoys considerable market power (and a profit margin around 30% that comes with it). And even though journals are not at the frontier of research in Economics, it still matters what happens at Elsevier because it controls so many of the top field journals... all of the Economics content of Elsevier is gated, and academic libraries have to pay through the nose to let faculty access the content, including their own works. Even errata and retraction notices are gated. There is no open access journal in Economics, and even in other fields where it is available, the cost is prohibitive (usually US$3000, even more with color charges!), which cannot be justified in any reasonable way by hosting costs. Indeed, Elsevier spends considerable resources trying to keep potential readers away, by gating the material for the general public and making it difficult for individuals to buy subscriptions, especially for hard copies. All this management of subscriptions and filtering of web traffic would disappear with open access, making it much cheaper, not more expensive. But this is not an issue only with Elsevier (Springer is much worse in this respect)... [Elsevier] was a huge backer of the Research Works Act in the US, which would have prohibited mandates that publicly funded research should be available in open-access repositories. Of course this generated a huge outcry from the scientific community (you know, the one that Elsevier claims to serve) and lead to a call for a boycott. This seems to have been successful, as Elsevier reversed its stance, thereby killing the bill. Unfortunately, few economists seem to have participated in the boycott, which is probably why Elsevier continues to flaunt the research community with no remorse. For example, it has not updated the listings of its journals for over a year in RePEc, and still vigorously refuses to let RePEc perform citation analysis on its contents. My suspicion is that RePEc is threatening some of the products that Elsevier is pushing (Sciverse, Scopus), and the interest of the research community becomes second fiddle. From what hear, people are deserting the Economics desk at Elsevier, starting with its head, which makes you wonder who is in charge of ‘the widest dissemination of content.’"