Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a Keep Out sign on the gates.

Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50(1). Springer charges Eur34.95(2), Wiley-Blackwell, $42(3). Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50(4).

Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792(5). Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930(6). Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets(7), which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy.

Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

Well, it is usual capitalism, and monopolies are fundamentally normal for capitalism, they are just more efficient in this parasitism.
More efficient parasite eat up less lucky brothers.

Returning to the subject of morality, I don’t think it is helpful to accuse Elsevier of immoral behavior: they are a big business and they want to maximize their profits, as businesses do.

Well, and this is where the issue is. It IS helpful to accuse them for immoral behavior. As second part of the cited sentence contains huge error.
Moral of capitalists and moral of working class are not the same morals at all. Elsevier want to "maximize their profits" at the loss of everyone else. So, next time some good looking guy (even pope or such) starts to tell you about your common moral with such bastards just spit at his face, as usually he is telling you this out of his own economical interest.

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/the-lairds-of-learning/

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/