It doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem. Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia).
The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.
Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.
You are in very very good company. The British mathematician Timothy Gowers famously boycotts Elsevier also
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
I am skeptical it is a problem isolated to Elsevier. Given the LLM craze now prioritizes open access, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open..., it would not surprise me people start gaming MDPI in the same way for example.
MDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of reviews and less original research).
I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.
"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.
They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
I'm certain that the comment you responded to never claimed that it was "isolated to Elsevier" in the first place, nor is it very compelling to speculate about how in the future something even worse might emerge.
Right now Elsevier is by far the biggest offender and also happens to the be the topic of the conversation and the article.
Exactly. Elsevier is a dominant company. Of course it's going to have a huge share of anything that goes into journals. They probably also have a huge share of the Nobel prize winning papers too.
That being said, I'm happy to encourage open access.
One of the reasons why in Germany universities were able to collectively negotiate better open publishing deals with Wiley and Springer, but Elsevier just flat out refused to agree to any better terms for three years.
(See Project DEAL: https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier)
I’m not sure why I’ve never really concerned myself with Elsevier, but that makes a lot of sense, knowing a rather vile and slimy con artist snake that works/ed for them.