[mti]

> Elsevier's role isn't finding collaborators - it's finding reviewers

This is also not true. It's usually journal editors who find reviewers. This is mostly unpaid work as well (publishers tend to chip in a bit for editorial board meetings, but that's about it).

Scientific publishers provide very, very little value to the scientific community. The reason why researchers want to publish in Journal X is that it has a good reputation, which is mostly a function of the editorial board's quality standards, and even more so, of Journal X's past publications (often dating back to way before Elsevier or whoever else actually acquired it).