We can live with Elsevier's "intellectual property" as of today being on sci-hub and such. Going forward however, the academia needs to rethink the concept of publications entirely.
The situation where the author pays to be published, for the publisher to arrange unpaid peer review (by people the author specified) is ridiculous, stopped scaling a while ago and benefits nobody.
The publisher could almost be replaced by a torrent tracker with some PKI for peer review. Then a researcher could create his own slice of knowledge by choosing works endorsed by keys he trusts/considers relevant to his area of research.
The publisher could almost be replaced by a torrent tracker with some PKI for peer review. Then a researcher could create his own slice of knowledge by choosing works endorsed by keys he trusts/considers relevant to his area of research.