Thanks for pointing this out. The revenue to scholarly societies is another big aspect that people often overlook. One side effect of killing off paywall journals is that a lot of scholarly societies will need to figure out different ways to make money to survive. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can get behind the idea that a society should not base it's financial existence on revenue from a paywall journal. But that's a reality of today's situation.
That's a good point - although based on anecdotal evidence from a couple editors of scholarly society affiliated journals I've talked to, the societies have largely already lost this revenue stream due to steep declines in subscriptions over the past decade. I'm very much in favor of disrupting the existing model of how academic publishing works (and applaud any efforts to cut out exploitative companies like Elsevier) but for anyone reading this who is working on something along those lines, please remember the scholarly societies and ordinary journal editors! If a new system emerges which allows them to be fairly compensated for the work they do but which cuts out the current corporate intermediaries like Elsevier and Brill, I think the current status quo will rapidly shift in a positive direction.
