Isn't this a website about startups and business? What is wrong with a healthy profit margin that is made by legal willing contracts between Elsevier and scientists?

Just because they make money and are involved with copyright they are automatically bad? If they were barely making any money and closer to broke startup founders, then they would be OK?

40% profit margins do not exist for long in properly functioning competitive markets. Deeply entrenched companies typically run at 10%. Monopolies (example: drug companies) run at 20% (arguably in the case of drug companies this is ok because they operate with much higher risk).

If you find a 40% margin that can't be ascribed to transient behavior, you have found a market that has entered one of the (many) modes of market failure, in which the usual arguments for markets being a force for good (or least evil) go out the window. We use markets precisely because they tend to avoid situations like this; it baffles me how frequently the "market did it so it must be good" argument rears its head every time there's an exception. It's circular reasoning, at least for those of us who don't take the moral infallibility of the free-market as an article of faith.

Specifically, they are not "automatically bad" because they make money using copyright. They are bad because they've found a loophole that lets them monopolize a critical distribution channel for taxpayer-funded research, and they're milking the shit out of it at enormous cost to taxpayers and students. Broke startup founders do not get to appropriate tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded work and hold it hostage from those who have paid for it, and if they did it would not be OK.

> They are bad because they've found a loophole that lets them monopolize a critical distribution channel for taxpayer-funded research

There would be no monopoly if scientists didn't agree to their terms and refused to submit papers to them. They'd go out of business very quickly.

No, they're bad because the majority of their product (that is, knowledge) isn't developed by them, or paid for by them. Instead, it's funded by universities and funding agencies. It's a parasitic relationship with very little benefit to the host.

It's a sign their profit is not just from the service they provide, which is really rather simple, but from a historically grown, entrenched system that is very hard to get rid of. They're basically a tax on society, and we'd be much better off if authors and their institutions made a clean break.