30 ms·

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

1104 points by davrosthedalek 6y ago

tams 6y ago
Snapshot for those who get a blocked message: https://archive.is/jISGG https://archive.is/jISGG
- samizdis 6y ago
  Thanks for that.
kerkeslager 6y ago
That's great. It's good to see MIT standing up for open access principles.
djohnston 6y ago
Excellent
pwillia7 6y ago
Maybe Aaron will get to see his dream come true posthumously -- I sure hope so.
obiefernandez 6y ago
Further indications that Aaron Swartz didn't die completely in vain...
- wegs 6y ago
  Let's not get carried away here. MIT administrators still use Swartz as an example to threaten potential whistleblowers. Faced with that, people back down. For all the public repentance, this was intentional and malicious by at least parts of the Central Admin. MIT has good guys and bad guys. The good guys won here, rejecting Elsevier. The bad players on the Swartz front are still there, and still making decision similar to Swartz. People back down much more quickly with that example held up as what happens if you don't play ball.
  - dbuder 6y ago
    Sounds like MIT needs a new statue right outside the main admin offices.
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  Came here to see that Aaron Swartz was mentioned, for people to remember and to learn about him and his incident. I don't see it as MIT "doing the right" thing, as much as virtue signaling. As an institution and bureaucracy it tries to self-preserve. Either by saying "he are against technology being used for piracy" or "we are for the open spread of information". Of course I am cynical, but I don't think MIT decided this out of the "goodness" of their heart.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Just came across his name yesterday when I was looking for python markdown parsers! Thinking about what happened to him, I'm a bit ambivalent. He was a great dude, for sure, but what he did with downloading the entire JSTOR database sneakily does sound a bit out there. It's definitely a Robinhood move, but Robinhood also had an arrest warrant on him. Expecting no less of a retaliation would have been naive at best. Many other hackers have been arrested, spent jail time and have come out of it to still go on with their life. I suppose you have to know which side of the law (agreeable or not) when you go the hacker route. He unfortunately elected to end his life over this. That is a great, great loss, but I'm not convinced we should start judging things in the world because someone killed themselves over it.
  - pas 6y ago
    The current copyright regime is too strict. As someone else pointed out JSTOR went open access without much ado. So basically the whole thing led to the death of some dude because he dared to show how much what he did did not really matter. It's not like universities just stopped paying for access because there's SciHub. And it's not like academics stopped paying journals for publishing because old stuff is open access.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    There are two pieces here: How the legal system behaved, and how MIT behaved. What you're saying makes 100% sense for an aggressive prosecutor. On the other hand, MIT was behaving in a way which was pure evil. To go back to the Robinhood analogy, I would expect the Sheriff of Nottingham to go after Robinhood with perfect dedication -- that's his job. On the other hand, if Friar Tuck made it his life's work to go after Robinhood, that'd be a different story.
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      It's a shame that our expectations for prosecutors are so low. (to be clear, I share them. But, it's a shame)
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      > On the other hand, MIT was behaving in a way which was pure evil. And they then proceeded to whitewash it, adding insult to injury.
- sicco 6y ago
  Obligatory "for those who haven't seen the documentary about Aaron's life": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ
  - qchris 6y ago
    Thank you so much for posting this; I hadn't heard of this documentary before, and the name Aaron Swartz was just something that sounded vaguely familiar. Just watched it, and I'm shocked and saddened.
h91wka 6y ago
Great news. Elsevier is a parasite.
rvz 6y ago
Finally. But several years late on the side of MIT in this case but at last better late than never.
DataWorker 6y ago
Come a long way since Aaron Swartz. Let’s hope the reform continues.
mdoshi 6y ago
This is great news! Going from prosecuting Swartz to ending a contract with Elsevier.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
q3k 6y ago
You don't have permission to access "http://news.mit.edu/2020/guided-by-open-access-principles-mit-ends-elsevier-negotiations-0611" on this server. Reference #18.9d580317.1591886472.57240f92
- qntmfred 6y ago
  the irony
- ghaff 6y ago
  The site is just being hugged a bit too hard.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Here is the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ It requires that: 1. No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals. 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights. 3. Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit. 4. Publishers will provide computational access to subscribed content as a standard part of all contracts, with no restrictions on non-consumptive, computational analysis of the corpus of subscribed content. 5. Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives. 6. Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models. Not surprising that Elsevier couldn't meet these requirements. #2 in particular seems antithetical to Elsevier's philosophy. What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have an Elsevier contract.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have an Elsevier contract. If you ever tried to dig deep into the internals of a large organization, you will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power. At least, this was my experience. For a mathematician used to third-excluded logic, it may seem impossible, since you can prove anything from "p and not p". Yet, these organizations manage to not be able to do arbitrary things from contradictory inputs, but somewhat sane things (some of the time).
  - skywhopper 6y ago
    I mean, the reality of any large institution (or even a single human being) is that there will inevitably exist many contradictory "rules" that must be handled. I'm not sure how it is amazing. It's a fundamental necessity for their existence.
whatshisface 6y ago
An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be that anyone who's still publishing in closed-access journals will be at a severe disadvantage in getting cited compared to people who publish open access and make preprints available.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to my point.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be considered "fraudulent" at this point.
      - wegs 6y ago
        That's what I do. If I want to say something obvious, I Google for the first citation which says that thing in a way which is readable, understandable, and correct. Honestly, the problem isn't with whom I cite, so much as: 1) Academia deciding to use metrics inappropriately (as well as expecting citations on well-known obvious things). I'm not going to adjust my work style because academics decided to adopt dumb metrics and build massive, dumb incentive structures around those metrics. 2) Reviewers expecting citations for everything, and not caring about quality of those citations. "The sky is blue" doesn't work. "The sky is blue (Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012)" works fine, even if Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012 is complete nonsense.
jroseman93 6y ago
Publishing industry is ripe for disruption. Publicly funded research should be publicly available. Any 'fees' charged by publishers should be proportional to the value-add those publishers provide. They can't claim the 'review process' is part of that monetary value-add when reviewers are almost never paid.
dannykwells 6y ago
Woohoo! First UC now Elsevier! The arc of the moral universe is long, but ever so often, it does indeed bend towards justice. RIP A.S.
underdeserver 6y ago
I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a monthly journal. Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a Google Doc. And if you want it printed, there are shops that can do that for you for a small fee as well. This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and could be 100% funded by those who are still willing to pay for paper versions or by tiny contributions from the top 100 universities.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more. It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
  - chrispeel 6y ago
    > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? I've been a reviewer and editor for various IEEE and other engineering publications and have never been paid. Of course funding for editors is helpful, yet it may be like open source where some are willing to put in work for free.
  - underdeserver 6y ago
birktj 6y ago
Recently (I believe around a year ago or so) my university lost access to many publisher services because of some negotiations. The negotiations were about a new Norwegian law requiring all publicly funded research to be publicly available. I don't remember exactly what happened with the negotiations, but I presume they somehow found a solution. EDIT: Found a relevant website about open access in Norway https://www.openaccess.no/english/ https://www.openaccess.no/english/
- Nemo_bis 6y ago
  The Norwegian case and many others are listed in the SPARC cancellation tracker: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/ https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-trackin...
omershapira 6y ago
This, alongside JSTOR's declaration of open access[1], shows that all major players in the Aaron Swartz case had other choices. RIP [1] https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/ https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/
nomercy400 6y ago
I'm curious (playing devil's advocate): Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals? And, if somebody from MIT does publish something under this framework, can they claim copyright and disallow any use of the contents of the papers if so convenient? Move away from patents and straight into copyright. We all know how well the US copyright system works, right? I mean, doesn't Elsevier guarantee that the paper will be 'free-from-copyright' of the original institution/country, to any other research institution part of their network. Like, share the knowledge to those connected. Do these moves away from Elsevier mean a more open-access, or a more-copyrighted-access to papers? I see no commitment for MIT to relinquish copyright, nor any commitment to make everything open access.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals? They were never required. Scientists do research and share their results so they can be improved and combined and provide insight. It started out with private letters between scientists in the early days, then journals appeared that would distribute the incoming letters to other interested parties. Over time it became a formalized system with metrics, incentives, publish or perish etc. But the original goal was to share and announce your results.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    Pretty much every research grant that feeds university researchers (as opposed to industry researchers) will require that the results of the research must be published; often with some more specific criteria - e.g. a peer-reviewed journal with an impact rating in the top quartile, not just on your webpage.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  I don't really get your questions. Elsevier was never the one who demanded that MIT published research, so this shouldn't change anything there. When a researcher publishes with Elsevier, the common practice when not transferring copyright is to give them a perpetual licence to publish the work. Additionally, presumably MIT requires their researchers to publish their work as Open Access, i.e. with a licence that allows re-use and distribution for everyone - so they cannot disallow use of the contents of the papers arbitrarily. Elsevier is not needed for that.
wpietri 6y ago
It is a rare pleasure to see people taking their principles seriously: "... the MIT Framework is grounded in the conviction that openly sharing research and educational materials is key to the Institute’s mission of advancing knowledge and bringing that knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges". Take note, corporations: this is how you live a mission statement.
- 3mcd 6y ago
  You should check out https://www.knowledgefutures.org https://www.knowledgefutures.org, a non-profit founded by the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab to build open authoring/publishing tools and a distributed knowledge platform.
snambi 6y ago
Why can't techincal papers use something similar to github/git Pull-request model?
- dguest 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? Do you mean curating papers via pull request? If that's your question, the answer is that there's absolutely nothing in the way technologically: academics could easily form shoestring "journals" around a github README files with links to arXiv. As others have said, the real issue is historical: for better or worse the currency of science is still peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals, and a lot of those journals are still owned by Elsevier. Obviously this is starting to change, but old traditions die hard.
- untilted 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
- qchris 6y ago
  I think you're looking for something like the Journal of Open Source Software [0]. [0] https://joss.theoj.org/ https://joss.theoj.org/
bogomipz 6y ago
>"MIT has long been a leader in open access. Adopted in 2009, the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy was one of the first and most far-reaching initiatives of its kind in the United States. Forty-seven percent of faculty journal articles published since the adoption of the policy are freely available to the world. Could someone comment on the figure of 47%? What are the reasons this wouldn't be higher than this given that the policy has been in effect well over a decade now?
czzr 6y ago
When thinking about the cost of providing the services journals provide, I’m always struck by the example of PloS - non-profit, set up with the mission of promoting open access, and just about surviving by charging authors $2000-$3000 per article. I can only conclude that managing journals is not as cost free as most people in this thread seem to think, for whatever reason.
- dfdz 6y ago
  You should not be getting down voted. I am an early career academic; there are some new non-profit open access journals that I would consider publishing in that cost ~$500 dollars to publish a paper. Everything is on arXix so I cannot justify the expense (perhaps if I was late in my career with lots of grant money I would help to support these journals..)
  - czzr 6y ago
    That’s interesting. I always thought that it was early career researchers who had to publish in journals to establish their reputations. Does it not work that way for you?
    - s0rce 6y ago
      In some fields you can probably just put up preprints if they are important enough and get noticed, otherwise I assume the OP meant they are publishing in for profit not open access journals that cost less for the author (via charging everyone else).
- zucker42 6y ago
  Better to get institutional support up front and make scientific knowledge freely available then to not charge authors and then limit access with noisome subscription fees.
- pas 6y ago
  What!? 2-3K? For .. what? Where does that money go? I mean referees don't get paid. And there's nothing else to do really if it's a digital journal.
OliverJones 6y ago
Question: is there a consequence to MIT's library system? Do they lose access to that publisher's journals for the patrons of their libraries? Or are their subscriptions to the journals a separate business deal? How does this all work?
jupp0r 6y ago
While this is really good news, it's still mind boggling to me why giving taxpayers free access to the research they paid for is still a controversial thing at all in 2020. Not to mention the benefit to science of giving everybody free access to everything.
heyblinkin 6y ago
As a former employee of Elsevier, you really do love to see it.
auggierose 6y ago
I don't know, does it matter at this point? All papers are available for free now anyway thanks to a Russian based operation...
- ghoshbishakh 6y ago
  Yes but not legally available for free for everyone.
ghoshbishakh 6y ago
This would make Aron Swartz proud
MrGunn 6y ago
As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that wasn't apparent before. Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there are. Is research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will posting preprints or research blogging fix everything? Nope. If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing. Information and analytical services that support researchers and clinicians is the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for many years now, and these businesses only get even more valuable as more and more content is available openly. At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end services that scientific societies, funders, researchers, and their institutions need to keep the system running so they can focus on their research. What are these systems? Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to support the mission of the society - advocating on policy issues important to their research community - through the society journal. Elsevier makes running the journal financially sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers, attracting and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics complaints, and providing a cheap platform. Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in alignment with the funders mission, not just by conferring status, but with more advanced ways of understand the broader impact of a work. Elsevier (including me personally) has worked to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the impact factor: https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics/elsevier-is-expanding-its-use-of-altmetrics https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics... Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase their work, recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for tenure & decide who should get it. After spending years working on projects with these different groups, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of how everything works & what the levers of change actually are. Happy to discuss with anyone!
monadic2 6y ago
Welp, apparently we aren’t shifting away from toxic publishing mechanisms any time soon.
stevespang 6y ago
Glad to see MIT give Elsevier "the finger"
xvilka 6y ago
MIT has its own publisher initiative that suits modern science - online, interactive, and open-source. PubPub[1][2] is closer to something like Authorea[3] and Overleaf[4]. [1] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [2] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub [3] https://authorea.com/ https://authorea.com/ [4] https://www.overleaf.com/ https://www.overleaf.com/
StreamBright 6y ago
The world is slowly becoming a better place.
sfgweilr4f 6y ago
Elsevier does what exactly? Publish articles? Can't the various education / research organizations set up their own? Other than existing horrible contracts, what exactly is stopping them?
oli5679 6y ago
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy
GrumpyNl 6y ago
Its about time, its just a cash machine.
RNCTX 6y ago
The state university I attended here in Texas has started publishing a list of their subscriptions and the costs. https://library.unt.edu/collection-management/transparency-library-subscription-pricing/ https://library.unt.edu/collection-management/transparency-l... What's notable is the ones who have tried to put non-disclosure clauses in their subscription contracts. In my opinion a state university should not be allowed, legally, to enter into a contract which is not fully available for public review.

1104 points by davrosthedalek 6y ago

tams 6y ago

Snapshot for those who get a blocked message: https://archive.is/jISGG https://archive.is/jISGG

samizdis 6y ago
Thanks for that.

kerkeslager 6y ago

That's great. It's good to see MIT standing up for open access principles.

djohnston 6y ago

Excellent

pwillia7 6y ago

Maybe Aaron will get to see his dream come true posthumously -- I sure hope so.

obiefernandez 6y ago

Further indications that Aaron Swartz didn't die completely in vain...

wegs 6y ago
Let's not get carried away here. MIT administrators still use Swartz as an example to threaten potential whistleblowers. Faced with that, people back down. For all the public repentance, this was intentional and malicious by at least parts of the Central Admin. MIT has good guys and bad guys. The good guys won here, rejecting Elsevier. The bad players on the Swartz front are still there, and still making decision similar to Swartz. People back down much more quickly with that example held up as what happens if you don't play ball.
- dbuder 6y ago
  Sounds like MIT needs a new statue right outside the main admin offices.
oldsklgdfth 6y ago
Came here to see that Aaron Swartz was mentioned, for people to remember and to learn about him and his incident. I don't see it as MIT "doing the right" thing, as much as virtue signaling. As an institution and bureaucracy it tries to self-preserve. Either by saying "he are against technology being used for piracy" or "we are for the open spread of information". Of course I am cynical, but I don't think MIT decided this out of the "goodness" of their heart.
ramraj07 6y ago
Just came across his name yesterday when I was looking for python markdown parsers! Thinking about what happened to him, I'm a bit ambivalent. He was a great dude, for sure, but what he did with downloading the entire JSTOR database sneakily does sound a bit out there. It's definitely a Robinhood move, but Robinhood also had an arrest warrant on him. Expecting no less of a retaliation would have been naive at best. Many other hackers have been arrested, spent jail time and have come out of it to still go on with their life. I suppose you have to know which side of the law (agreeable or not) when you go the hacker route. He unfortunately elected to end his life over this. That is a great, great loss, but I'm not convinced we should start judging things in the world because someone killed themselves over it.
- pas 6y ago
  The current copyright regime is too strict. As someone else pointed out JSTOR went open access without much ado. So basically the whole thing led to the death of some dude because he dared to show how much what he did did not really matter. It's not like universities just stopped paying for access because there's SciHub. And it's not like academics stopped paying journals for publishing because old stuff is open access.
- woofie11 6y ago
  There are two pieces here: How the legal system behaved, and how MIT behaved. What you're saying makes 100% sense for an aggressive prosecutor. On the other hand, MIT was behaving in a way which was pure evil. To go back to the Robinhood analogy, I would expect the Sheriff of Nottingham to go after Robinhood with perfect dedication -- that's his job. On the other hand, if Friar Tuck made it his life's work to go after Robinhood, that'd be a different story.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    It's a shame that our expectations for prosecutors are so low. (to be clear, I share them. But, it's a shame)
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    > On the other hand, MIT was behaving in a way which was pure evil. And they then proceeded to whitewash it, adding insult to injury.
sicco 6y ago
Obligatory "for those who haven't seen the documentary about Aaron's life": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ
- qchris 6y ago
  Thank you so much for posting this; I hadn't heard of this documentary before, and the name Aaron Swartz was just something that sounded vaguely familiar. Just watched it, and I'm shocked and saddened.

h91wka 6y ago

Great news. Elsevier is a parasite.

rvz 6y ago

Finally. But several years late on the side of MIT in this case but at last better late than never.

DataWorker 6y ago

Come a long way since Aaron Swartz. Let’s hope the reform continues.

mdoshi 6y ago

This is great news! Going from prosecuting Swartz to ending a contract with Elsevier.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

q3k 6y ago

You don't have permission to access "http://news.mit.edu/2020/guided-by-open-access-principles-mit-ends-elsevier-negotiations-0611" on this server. Reference #18.9d580317.1591886472.57240f92

qntmfred 6y ago
the irony
ghaff 6y ago
The site is just being hugged a bit too hard.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

Here is the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ It requires that: 1. No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals. 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights. 3. Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit. 4. Publishers will provide computational access to subscribed content as a standard part of all contracts, with no restrictions on non-consumptive, computational analysis of the corpus of subscribed content. 5. Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives. 6. Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models. Not surprising that Elsevier couldn't meet these requirements. #2 in particular seems antithetical to Elsevier's philosophy. What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have an Elsevier contract.

enriquto 6y ago
> What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have an Elsevier contract. If you ever tried to dig deep into the internals of a large organization, you will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power. At least, this was my experience. For a mathematician used to third-excluded logic, it may seem impossible, since you can prove anything from "p and not p". Yet, these organizations manage to not be able to do arbitrary things from contradictory inputs, but somewhat sane things (some of the time).
- skywhopper 6y ago
  I mean, the reality of any large institution (or even a single human being) is that there will inevitably exist many contradictory "rules" that must be handled. I'm not sure how it is amazing. It's a fundamental necessity for their existence.

whatshisface 6y ago

An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be that anyone who's still publishing in closed-access journals will be at a severe disadvantage in getting cited compared to people who publish open access and make preprints available.

calvinmorrison 6y ago
probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to my point.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be considered "fraudulent" at this point.
    - wegs 6y ago
      That's what I do. If I want to say something obvious, I Google for the first citation which says that thing in a way which is readable, understandable, and correct. Honestly, the problem isn't with whom I cite, so much as: 1) Academia deciding to use metrics inappropriately (as well as expecting citations on well-known obvious things). I'm not going to adjust my work style because academics decided to adopt dumb metrics and build massive, dumb incentive structures around those metrics. 2) Reviewers expecting citations for everything, and not caring about quality of those citations. "The sky is blue" doesn't work. "The sky is blue (Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012)" works fine, even if Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012 is complete nonsense.

jroseman93 6y ago

Publishing industry is ripe for disruption. Publicly funded research should be publicly available. Any 'fees' charged by publishers should be proportional to the value-add those publishers provide. They can't claim the 'review process' is part of that monetary value-add when reviewers are almost never paid.

dannykwells 6y ago

Woohoo! First UC now Elsevier! The arc of the moral universe is long, but ever so often, it does indeed bend towards justice. RIP A.S.

underdeserver 6y ago

I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a monthly journal. Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a Google Doc. And if you want it printed, there are shops that can do that for you for a small fee as well. This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and could be 100% funded by those who are still willing to pay for paper versions or by tiny contributions from the top 100 universities.

supernova87a 6y ago
Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more. It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
- chrispeel 6y ago
  > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? I've been a reviewer and editor for various IEEE and other engineering publications and have never been paid. Of course funding for editors is helpful, yet it may be like open source where some are willing to put in work for free.
- underdeserver 6y ago

birktj 6y ago

Recently (I believe around a year ago or so) my university lost access to many publisher services because of some negotiations. The negotiations were about a new Norwegian law requiring all publicly funded research to be publicly available. I don't remember exactly what happened with the negotiations, but I presume they somehow found a solution. EDIT: Found a relevant website about open access in Norway https://www.openaccess.no/english/ https://www.openaccess.no/english/

Nemo_bis 6y ago
The Norwegian case and many others are listed in the SPARC cancellation tracker: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/ https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-trackin...

omershapira 6y ago

This, alongside JSTOR's declaration of open access[1], shows that all major players in the Aaron Swartz case had other choices. RIP [1] https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/ https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/

nomercy400 6y ago

I'm curious (playing devil's advocate): Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals? And, if somebody from MIT does publish something under this framework, can they claim copyright and disallow any use of the contents of the papers if so convenient? Move away from patents and straight into copyright. We all know how well the US copyright system works, right? I mean, doesn't Elsevier guarantee that the paper will be 'free-from-copyright' of the original institution/country, to any other research institution part of their network. Like, share the knowledge to those connected. Do these moves away from Elsevier mean a more open-access, or a more-copyrighted-access to papers? I see no commitment for MIT to relinquish copyright, nor any commitment to make everything open access.

bonoboTP 6y ago
> Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals? They were never required. Scientists do research and share their results so they can be improved and combined and provide insight. It started out with private letters between scientists in the early days, then journals appeared that would distribute the incoming letters to other interested parties. Over time it became a formalized system with metrics, incentives, publish or perish etc. But the original goal was to share and announce your results.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Pretty much every research grant that feeds university researchers (as opposed to industry researchers) will require that the results of the research must be published; often with some more specific criteria - e.g. a peer-reviewed journal with an impact rating in the top quartile, not just on your webpage.
Vinnl 6y ago
I don't really get your questions. Elsevier was never the one who demanded that MIT published research, so this shouldn't change anything there. When a researcher publishes with Elsevier, the common practice when not transferring copyright is to give them a perpetual licence to publish the work. Additionally, presumably MIT requires their researchers to publish their work as Open Access, i.e. with a licence that allows re-use and distribution for everyone - so they cannot disallow use of the contents of the papers arbitrarily. Elsevier is not needed for that.

wpietri 6y ago

It is a rare pleasure to see people taking their principles seriously: "... the MIT Framework is grounded in the conviction that openly sharing research and educational materials is key to the Institute’s mission of advancing knowledge and bringing that knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges". Take note, corporations: this is how you live a mission statement.

3mcd 6y ago
You should check out https://www.knowledgefutures.org https://www.knowledgefutures.org, a non-profit founded by the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab to build open authoring/publishing tools and a distributed knowledge platform.

snambi 6y ago

Why can't techincal papers use something similar to github/git Pull-request model?

dguest 6y ago
Can you elaborate? Do you mean curating papers via pull request? If that's your question, the answer is that there's absolutely nothing in the way technologically: academics could easily form shoestring "journals" around a github README files with links to arXiv. As others have said, the real issue is historical: for better or worse the currency of science is still peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals, and a lot of those journals are still owned by Elsevier. Obviously this is starting to change, but old traditions die hard.
untilted 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
qchris 6y ago
I think you're looking for something like the Journal of Open Source Software [0]. [0] https://joss.theoj.org/ https://joss.theoj.org/

bogomipz 6y ago

>"MIT has long been a leader in open access. Adopted in 2009, the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy was one of the first and most far-reaching initiatives of its kind in the United States. Forty-seven percent of faculty journal articles published since the adoption of the policy are freely available to the world. Could someone comment on the figure of 47%? What are the reasons this wouldn't be higher than this given that the policy has been in effect well over a decade now?

czzr 6y ago

When thinking about the cost of providing the services journals provide, I’m always struck by the example of PloS - non-profit, set up with the mission of promoting open access, and just about surviving by charging authors $2000-$3000 per article. I can only conclude that managing journals is not as cost free as most people in this thread seem to think, for whatever reason.

dfdz 6y ago
You should not be getting down voted. I am an early career academic; there are some new non-profit open access journals that I would consider publishing in that cost ~$500 dollars to publish a paper. Everything is on arXix so I cannot justify the expense (perhaps if I was late in my career with lots of grant money I would help to support these journals..)
- czzr 6y ago
  That’s interesting. I always thought that it was early career researchers who had to publish in journals to establish their reputations. Does it not work that way for you?
  - s0rce 6y ago
    In some fields you can probably just put up preprints if they are important enough and get noticed, otherwise I assume the OP meant they are publishing in for profit not open access journals that cost less for the author (via charging everyone else).
zucker42 6y ago
Better to get institutional support up front and make scientific knowledge freely available then to not charge authors and then limit access with noisome subscription fees.
pas 6y ago
What!? 2-3K? For .. what? Where does that money go? I mean referees don't get paid. And there's nothing else to do really if it's a digital journal.

OliverJones 6y ago

Question: is there a consequence to MIT's library system? Do they lose access to that publisher's journals for the patrons of their libraries? Or are their subscriptions to the journals a separate business deal? How does this all work?

jupp0r 6y ago

While this is really good news, it's still mind boggling to me why giving taxpayers free access to the research they paid for is still a controversial thing at all in 2020. Not to mention the benefit to science of giving everybody free access to everything.

heyblinkin 6y ago

As a former employee of Elsevier, you really do love to see it.

auggierose 6y ago

I don't know, does it matter at this point? All papers are available for free now anyway thanks to a Russian based operation...

ghoshbishakh 6y ago
Yes but not legally available for free for everyone.

ghoshbishakh 6y ago

This would make Aron Swartz proud

MrGunn 6y ago

As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that wasn't apparent before. Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there are. Is research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will posting preprints or research blogging fix everything? Nope. If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing. Information and analytical services that support researchers and clinicians is the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for many years now, and these businesses only get even more valuable as more and more content is available openly. At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end services that scientific societies, funders, researchers, and their institutions need to keep the system running so they can focus on their research. What are these systems? Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to support the mission of the society - advocating on policy issues important to their research community - through the society journal. Elsevier makes running the journal financially sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers, attracting and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics complaints, and providing a cheap platform. Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in alignment with the funders mission, not just by conferring status, but with more advanced ways of understand the broader impact of a work. Elsevier (including me personally) has worked to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the impact factor: https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics/elsevier-is-expanding-its-use-of-altmetrics https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics... Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase their work, recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for tenure & decide who should get it. After spending years working on projects with these different groups, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of how everything works & what the levers of change actually are. Happy to discuss with anyone!

monadic2 6y ago

Welp, apparently we aren’t shifting away from toxic publishing mechanisms any time soon.

stevespang 6y ago

Glad to see MIT give Elsevier "the finger"

xvilka 6y ago

MIT has its own publisher initiative that suits modern science - online, interactive, and open-source. PubPub[1][2] is closer to something like Authorea[3] and Overleaf[4]. [1] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [2] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub [3] https://authorea.com/ https://authorea.com/ [4] https://www.overleaf.com/ https://www.overleaf.com/

StreamBright 6y ago

The world is slowly becoming a better place.

sfgweilr4f 6y ago

Elsevier does what exactly? Publish articles? Can't the various education / research organizations set up their own? Other than existing horrible contracts, what exactly is stopping them?

oli5679 6y ago

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy

GrumpyNl 6y ago

Its about time, its just a cash machine.

RNCTX 6y ago

The state university I attended here in Texas has started publishing a list of their subscriptions and the costs. https://library.unt.edu/collection-management/transparency-library-subscription-pricing/ https://library.unt.edu/collection-management/transparency-l... What's notable is the ones who have tried to put non-disclosure clauses in their subscription contracts. In my opinion a state university should not be allowed, legally, to enter into a contract which is not fully available for public review.