Arxiv and the internet do more for science than Elsevier. They're rent-seeking middlemen, having lost any of whatever their purpose might once have been.

I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if all academic research was openly published and freely accessible - they could select what they consider to be the best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity / artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.

You absolutely need to solve the gatekeeping and reputation part, otherwise your newly-minted open access journal would be filled to the brim with cranks and charlatans.

There are many more publishers than Elsevier for scientific publications, some of which are already following a strictly open access policy.

A difficulty, too, is that choice of publishing venue is based on visibility and readership. And in my experience, EU-administered projects around scholarly publishing like these are well-meaning, but make baffling choices about focus, organization, and scope that hobble them.

Consider that this is a journal whose scope is defined not by field, but by funding initiatives. It places an astoundingly small emphasis on making research visible: contrasted with most major journals, with websites that might be split between research articles proper and editorial articles, but are still heavily focused on presenting articles, Open Research Europe doesn't have a single non-truncated article title on its front page, and devotes the vast majority of the page to journal administration and self-advertisement. The current lead highlight of PNAS is a section of rotating blurbs about articles, both research and editorial, for example. The current highlight of Open Research Europe is a description of Open Research Europe and logos of associated groups, including a second copy of the European Commission logo, in addition to the one on the top of the page. For that matter, the journal has a three-letter domain name, ore.eu, that it uses entirely to talk about itself, with only a single, small, text link to the journal itself. Why publish at a journal where your research seems to be far down their list of priorities?

With that said, I'm hopeful that CERN taking this over is a good sign. Zenodo is a great asset to the research community, and I feel like CERN is better situated to understand what will make a journal where researchers will want to publish. And I'd note, unlike Open Research Europe, Zenodo's front page is primarily a list of recent uploads, complete with partial abstracts.

>Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting, advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can reduce the costs a lot.

That can depend on how the proceedings are published. Dagstuhl Publishing, for example, does do some typesetting and proofreading work for proceedings they publish, they just have it arranged in an extremely efficient way (everyone submits LaTeX using their class, so they're mostly fixing mistakes). They also do charge (an extremely small) publishing fee to the conference.

Conference papers should be abolished, because they require international travel, which is getting more difficult every year. 10–20 years ago, when travel was cheap and easy, it was mostly just people from developing countries who could often not attend. Typically because they could not afford it or get a visa in time. But today almost everyone is impacted by wars, international tensions, travel restrictions, immigration policies, and the overall uncertainty.

I've attended three international conferences in the past year. In each of them, there were plenty of people missing. People who would usually have attended but could not, due to issues that did not exist in the 2010s.