People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?

Exactly. And then their answer is that they do things like:

from training and managing peer reviewers to preventing plagiarism to building interactive components into digital versions.

The first one is bullshit. No publisher ever trained me or anyone I know to be a peer reviewer. If you’re lucky your advisor will show you how to do it, if not you learn it by looking at the reviews you’ve received for your own papers.

The second one is something that anyone with elementary understanding of web design could do in minutes.

Are those things really more valuable than actually creating and reviewing the content?

Publishers are full of shit, and most senior academics enable this sort of business by attaching prestige to paid publications instead of going open access. What Elbakyan is doing is the only logical way to tackle the problem.