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As other commenters have mentioned, MIT paying for articles a la carte worked out cheaper than getting all-access subscription from Elsevier. Presumably Elsevier would want to stem this sales channel so institutions would be forced to pay more.

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Large corporations use Article Galaxy to manage their access to digital copies of journal articles. Such organizations don't have a history of large libraries which subscribe to every issue of a journal. Their employees won't pay for access themselves. They can't raise purchase orders which require multiple department signoffs for a $25 paper. The corporations don't want to pay hundreds of times for the same article, nor do they want to infringe and face legal risks. So they need the brokers to work the system for them.

Any individual publisher which restricted access via these brokers would face a sudden loss of revenue and a knock on effect to the prestige of their journals. If they allowed some customers to use these services but not others, the predatory nature of the model would stick out a mile to institutes and regulators.

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