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We are working on it. There 16000 academics who promised to boycott elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/. There are 60 major research institutions in Germany who have cancelled their contract with Elsevier to force negotiation of a reasonable contract: https://www.projekt-deal.de/ve... There are similar initiatives in other countries.

Elsevier is the group that needs to go fuck themselves:

the cost of knowledge.

This is great- Elsevier and Springer (and other for-profit publishers) have been charging exorbitant prices for journals and there have been some other mass resignations where people started a free or at least affordable alternative with pretty much the same board. One of the first big ones was the journal Topology, which reconstituted itself with the exact same editorial board in a non-profit setting, described here. That was in 2006 and though I'd hoped this would spread like wildfire, it has only happened about a dozen times since then.

There are good quality affordable journals, run by professional societies or universities, which are an excellent alternative to Elsevier and other expensive for-profit journals. For the health of science, it is important that people choose to submit there. For untenured people who are under a great deal of pressure to submit to "top journals" it poses a difficult quandary, but for those of us for whom that isn't a concern, I don't see a reason to continue to support journals and publishers which have repeatedly done poorly.

The Cost of Knowledge has lots of information about efforts to improve the scientific publishing culture.

There have been other cases of prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria who resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?

In other Elsevier news, more journal shenanigans are described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions. It's not clear what the high prices of journals are paying for when there are intermittent episodes like this.

Elsevier is the target of a boycott that's been going on for over 3 years now :

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

(I've personally declined reviewing articles when I realized it was for an Elsevier journal).

As mentioned in the other recent academic publishing story, there has been some progress but it has been slow. One thing that I am hopeful about are "epijournals" which separate the review from the distribution by serving as overlays to the remarkably successful arxiv preprint servers, at least in many areas of math and physics.

There are a number of issues here, many of which have been brought up often before. A few to recap:

1. Prestige: As a fully-promoted researcher who isn't worried much about prestige, I am free to only submit articles to journals which are either open-access or are reasonably-priced (for example, many of those run by universities or professional societies, rather than by for-profit organizations.) Which I choose to do, and have made clear for many years via the Banff Protocol and now the CostOfKnowledge petition. However, when collaborations with junior researchers lead to publications, I am willing to submit to some of the other journals, as for the co-author, the prestige may be important for them getting a job, tenure, promotion, or grant funding.
2. Standards: Oddly, many of the open-access/free electronic journals have standards that are much higher than many of the for-profit journals. The second and lower tiers of for-profit journals will often publish less-than-impressive to just plain terrible articles and have much lower standards than the typical electronic ones. They have economic incentives to publish many articles, and there are sites devoted to exposing various sham journals or editorial failings of journals from Elsevier, etc. I think that many of the electronic free journals are worried about not being prestigious enough and so they tend to have high standards, significantly higher than many for-profit ones. I've had things that were rejected by good electronic journals that were accepted quickly and with high praise to middling traditional journals.
3. Author-pays model: there has been a proliferation of "open-access" publications, some of which are outright scams, see Beall's list of predatory "open-access" publishers. Often, these journals have names very similar to existing prestigious-to-middling journals, which complicates things and has made many authors naturally suspicious of various open-access journals as a whole.
4. Institutional culture: it takes a while for things to change. There have been a few mass resignations of for-profit journal editorial boards to start more-or-less identical less-expensive or free versions which are basically identically, but not nearly as many as I have hoped. Tim Gowers' efforts and the recent White House memo in the USA are progress but of course there is still a long way to go.

Well done! Since you are already doing this, have you thought about signing the Cost of Knowledge petition if you haven't already done? In theory, this will prevent at least Elsevier editors from asking you to review in the first place and hopefully help establish more momentum for change.

In my experience with declining requests to review, I have commonly mentioned access and/or price as concerns for declining and have found some sympathy with various editors. If this becomes more commonplace, hopefully that will speed change to more reasonable publishing models.

Looks like the Elsevier boycott by academics had an effect. Still, this looks like more of a tactical response than a real change in position for Elsevier.

So, there is yet one more reason to boycott the Dutch bandits at Elsevier? Bastards. Join the boycott at http://thecostofknowledge.com/