With due respect, if Elsevier and Springer (and IEEE etc.) went away tomorrow Science would not “be fucked”. We would be forced to sit down and work through a set of new open access journals and conferences. It would be an annoying few months and some publishing activities would be modestly disrupted. But all of the reviewing and editing and conference chairing is already run by volunteers. The only reason we don’t replace the journals now is because of (huge amounts of) path dependence and because nobody can solve the coordination problem of getting everyone to drop everything and do it. But if those publishers went away tomorrow, you’d solve both those problems in an instant.