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MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
- arijun 2y agoWhat library are the researchers getting their access through now? Are they saying the MIT library bought digital copies of all those publications?
- tony_cannistra 2y agoThey are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. The article states that MIT pays $300,000 annually for individual request fees, far less than the prior contract amount.
- gruez 2y ago>They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet. IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyright infringement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
- shkkmo 2y agoYour link is broken, should be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_.... You missed the final period
- skissane 2y agoYour link is broken too – they didn't miss anything, HN removes the final period. Solution is to %-escape it as %2E for a working link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc%2E https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 2y agoWhy would Article Galaxy be shut down? It makes it easier for Elsevier's articles to generate revenue: https://www.researchsolutions.com/ https://www.researchsolutions.com/
- gruez 2y agoAs 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.
- outop 2y agoLarge 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.
- pavon 2y agoArticle Galaxy contracts with publishers to allow them to resell papers[1], they aren't depending on a shaky interpretation of copyright law to resell digital goods. Which makes it even easier for the big publishers to cut them off, or raise their rates if enough universities try to switch to pay-per-article. [1]https://www.researchsolutions.com/about/publishers https://www.researchsolutions.com/about/publishers
- ReptileMan 2y agoz library
- MarkusQ 2y agoAaron Swartz would have liked some of those principles. This is a small, "better late than never" step for most of us, but for Aaron...it's more like "too little, too late."
- jashper 2y agoMy first thought as well
- HDThoreaun 2y agoSurely MIT made this move at least partially due to Aaron's legacy. I hope and believe he'd be happy to see this.
- HaZeust 2y agoSomething I thought of too, second to only a few months ago, where I remember an article coming to the top of HN stating that JSTOR was now free in a ton of prisons. Stopped me dead in my tracks, with potent thought of Aaron - may he rest.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DoctorOetker 2y agoI consider it a lot more obscene, MIT doesn't go after all the megacorps that are training ML algorithms on research articles because they feel small in comparison, but if a kid borrows too many articles, or in too quick a succession, they had no problem squashing him like a bug. Its the same behavior you seen in frustrated adolescents that feel to small to retaliate against the perpetrators of their misfortune and "start small" by torturing smaller animals...
- 1oooqooq 2y agothose companies usually pay Elsevier for the whole bundle because it's cheaper than scrapping. the system greatly benefits those it pretends to protect the authors against.
- seatac76 2y agoQuestion: What is Elsevier’s value proposition? Could that be replicated by on open source offering?
- Y_Y 2y agoThe own the prestigious journal names, you can trivially do what they do, but you lack the prestige.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoLike Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry?
- azan_ 2y agoNo, like Lancet or Cell.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoThe bundle pricing is a problem, as is consolidation in the publishing market. The fact that that there are so few publishers nowadays really doesn't help with pricing. Another example why antitrust enforcement is needed.
- pdonis 2y agoIt already is: arxiv.org.
- dheera 2y agoI wish arxiv.org would have a big "Booooo" banner for papers without code.
- slaymaker1907 2y agoI don't think it's always necessary if the paper makes it really clear how things were done. And just because the code is available, it doesn't mean that it is actually reproducible or comprehensible.
- stackedinserter 2y agoUS universities could create enough pressure on Elsevier to make them seriously reconsider their practices.
- 9question1 2y agoMaking Elsevier reconsider its practices is a self-defeating goal. Pay-per-access research publishing should be driven out of business. The majority of institutions funding the actual research being done are publicly funded or receive large public tax breaks, so the resulting research should be publicly accessible, and the peer review process should be managed and funded within a similar network of institutions, not by an oligarchy of rent-seeking private entities.
- treyd 2y agoCan universities just do a buy-out of Elsevier and wind it down? Surely they really have the upper hand here.
- lelanthran 2y agoThere is only one solution to abusive monopolies: government intervention. In this case, government funds can come with a contract that states all published results of that research must, after publication, be available for free. This effectively means no changes to the current contracts Elsevier has with authors and with readers; all that happens is that government law trumps private contracts, so the universities/authors are free to distribute copies after publication. Right now, the contracts forbid that.
- amadeuspagel 2y agoThey certainly can't coordinate to create pressure on Elsevier without violating antitrust law.
- Etheryte 2y ago> During negotiations with Elsevier in 2020, MIT presented its principles to the publisher’s representatives as the basis for new contract negotiations. Once it was clear that the company would not agree to advancing MIT’s principles outlined in the Framework (such as allowing all authors to retain their copyright), the Libraries made the decision not to renew its contract, effective that July. > In 2022, Elsevier approached MIT with a request to re-engage in contract discussions. This time, Bourg was joined by an MIT contracts attorney in the negotiation, and once again, the Libraries’ asks were based on the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. MIT requested an outlining of the goods and services they would be paying for, some means of using the MIT contract to advance equity in the scholarly communications system, and a contract that allowed all MIT authors (including non-corresponding authors) to have their articles openly available in a repository without an embargo. However, the company returned to MIT with its standard read and publish contract proposal, and MIT once again decided to remain out of contract. This is such a glorious example of disenshittify or die [0]. Elsevier keeps pretending it has the upper hand to force itself on institutions, but the less institutions play their game, the more obvious it becomes that nothing of value was lost. [0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-abou...
- tiahura 2y agoWhy not adopt the law school approach? Let the grad students publish the journals.
- dan-robertson 2y agoIt’s already the case that many of the people involved in publishing an article are unpaid. Authors and peer reviewers are not paid (indeed authors may have to pay for open access). Editors are sometimes paid. There are professionals employed by the publisher – copy editors, typesetters(?), etc – who are compensated, though it is not clear they are providing that much value.
- lupire 2y agoLegal academic scholarships is much small and less relevant than science scholarship. The legal publishing that matters is done by the government -- courts and legislatures.
- amadeuspagel 2y agoCourts are influenced by academic scholarship.
- j7ake 2y agoThese journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago[flagged]
- bigfudge 2y agoIn my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent. Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the victims.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago[flagged]
- matthewdgreen 2y agoMost real problems in the world are coordination problems, where one motivated/coordinated entity sits on an essential “toll bridge”, and the whole world can theoretically just coordinate to route around them. But because “everyone else in the world” is a huge number of people with their own mixed up set of incentives, and the solution doesn’t work unless a critical mass coordinates to do the same thing, this turns out to be really hard.
- kelnos 2y ago> They don't need to work with any formal publisher. LaTeX and the Internet make it easier than ever. Nobody needs any of the publishers to get their work out. That's not how academia works, though. It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.
- mlhpdx 2y ago> MIT presented its principles to the publisher’s representatives as the basis for new contract negotiations. This is an incredibly important and powerful strategy, as a customer or a vendor. When everything is negotiable, trouble follows. The instant gratification of a "win" doesn't help move an organization forward. Having and sticking to principles does, with practical benefits. Trust grows and culture improves. Consistency (in contracts, features, information, behavior) builds.
- mmooss 2y agoThe effect on experienced negotiators is different: Portraying it as a principle, a policy ('our policy is ...'), an emotional issue, etc. are all just window dressings for what they want, and everyone tries to portray their wants to be as non-negotiable as possible in order to drive up the price they can demand. One basic tactic is to act angry about your want; some politicians love to do this one - it's a new outrage every day. Well I also can act angry and say something or anything is non-negotiable, but the only question is, how much am I willing to give up in order to get that result. Acting angry, saying 'it's our policy' - I don't care about your internal policies; they aren't laws and you can change them at any time; they are your choices just like any other in a negotiation.
- seb1204 2y agoWhat the document is called in the end is secondary. The important point in my opinion is that MIT sat together and discussed and also wrote down what they want, how they want it and likely (as an outcome of their discussion) also have an understanding where there are areas to negotiate/compromise on are. Or in other words, they prepared themselves for the negotiations so they know when to be firm or angry.
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoNot quite - look at Brexit negotiations , EU had clear principles, which were obvious to anyone except brexiters, and the UK position was wish-washy
- cortesoft 2y ago
- hyeonwho4 2y agoThe article mentioned that MIT saved 80%, and that they are paying $300,000 to purchase on a per article basis. So their previous contract with Elsevier was $1.5M annually. Elsevier's net income is £2.02 billion (2022)(Wikipedia). So the loss to Elsevier from MIT is about 0.04% of net income. Which makes sense: MIT is one of around 2000 universities worldwide. I hope this catches on elsewhere, too.
- DevX101 2y agoThey'll lose more. Many universities will follow. If it's good enough for MIT...
- rahimnathwani 2y agoThr article says: This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year
- dataflow 2y agoAren't the articles just going to get more expensive to make up for this?
- giantg2 2y agoOr perhaps lower quality.
- salt4034 2y agoWhy lower quality? The money doesn't go to authors, editors or peer-reviewers.
- PopePompus 2y agoYou're certainly right about authors and peer-reviewers, but are you sure that editors don't get paid with some of that money?
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- bell-cot 2y agoDaydream: MIT instructs its Tenure Committees to ignore any articles published (by candidates for tenure) in Elsevier journals.
- dhosek 2y agoThere is a move in academia towards omitting the names of journals from CVs and a suggestion that perhaps hiring and tenure committees should be given copies of a candidates five best papers (without publication information) to use in evaluating rather than just using a list of publications in making decisions. It seems like a much more rational approach to me.
- ConradKilroy 2y agoWonderful. “Look at data about use, costs, and find allies across your campus who care about issues of equity and openness,” Bourg said. “This is both the right thing to do in terms of our values with public engagement and the right thing to do from an economic point of view.” - Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries at MIT.
- mncharity 2y agoSome random bits of context. This conflict goes back a long time. In the early 1990's, with online journals just getting started, MIT was able to insist on principles like "anyone physically in the library has full access, even if they are not otherwise affiliated with MIT". A couple of years later, power shifted, and Elsevier could "our terms, take it or leave it". Then three decades, a human generation, of Elsevier rent-seeking, and so many people working towards Open Access, unbundling, google scholar, arXiv, sci-hub, and so on. Societal change can be so very slow, nonmonotonic, and profoundly discouraging. And yet here we are, making progress. For anyone unfamiliar with "author [...] required to relinquish copyright [...] generous reuse rights", journals would require authors to completely sign over copyright, so authors' subsequent other-than-fair-use usage of fragments would be a copyright violation. Rarely enforced, but legally you'd have to obtain permission. While some institutions sign contracts easily, and struggle with the fallout later, MIT legal culture has been pain-up-front careful with contracts. Which is sometimes painful. But IIRC, we're today using X Windows instead of CMU's Andrew, because MIT could say "sure!" while CMU was "sure, err,... we'll get back to you... some mess to clean up first".
- hbbio 2y ago> we're today using X Windows instead of CMU's Andrew And in that world, TypeScript would have to find another name! Now, good luck googling Andrew Typescript :) Edit: Found it... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ljdocs/mkmost/fig4.gif https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ljdocs/mkmost/fig4.gif
- Something1234 2y agoI'm going to need more history here on exactly what you linked this is insanely interesting. Alternate windows things in unix land are always interesting
- andyjohnson0 2y agoUndoubtedly a reference to CMU's Andrew project [1], which was an experimental distributed computing environment from the 1980s - with an emphasis on providing infrastructure for pedagogy. Ideas developed by Andrew and Project Athena [2] can still be seen in contemporary software today: window managers, distributed file systems and authentication, compouns documents , etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena
- dhosek 2y agoInteresting recent history from Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX) 2019 UC system negotiations On 28 February 2019, following long negotiations, the University of California announced it would be terminating all subscriptions with Elsevier. On 16 March 2021, following further negotiations and significant changes including (i) universal open access to University of California research and (ii) containing the "excessively high costs" being charged by publishers, the university renewed its subscription.
- antoine-levitt 2y agoI'm willing to bet the actual reason the transition went so smoothly and the library doesn't pay that much in per-article fees is because everybody just used sci-hub.
- PopePompus 2y agoBut sci-hub stopped adding new articles years ago. It's significantly less useful than it used to be.
- mullingitover 2y agoI wonder how far California could go on its own in destroying the journal cartels. They really are a parasitic racket, and I don't think the average voter understand how bad it really is. I feel like one basic ballot measure to the effect of "All state funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void" might be enough to knock over the first domino, hopefully culminating in it being made a federal regulation.
- jjtheblunt 2y agowould that be unconstitutional violation of ex post facto? I'm not lawyer, so that question is one i don't know how to even approach.
- xbar 2y agoThere are laws that make contract clauses illegal/unenforceable. Think right to work.
- daemonologist 2y agoI believe ex post facto in the US only applies to criminal cases. Retroactive civil regulations are not restricted (at least by the federal constitution). https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/3us386 https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/3us386
- dredmorbius 2y agoCorrect: In a legal context, ex post facto is most typically used to refer to a criminal statute that punishes actions retroactively, thereby criminalizing conduct that was legal when originally performed. Two clauses in the United States Constitution prohibit ex post facto laws: Article 1, § 9 --- This prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto. Article 1 § 10. --- This prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto. <https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ex_post_facto https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ex_post_facto>
- lkjdsklf 2y ago
- nojvek 2y agoElsevier is a rent seeking parasite and needs to go. They add little value other than controlling access.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe MIT principles framework (linked in TFA) is here: <https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/> The core principles of an MIT Framework for publisher contracts are: - No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals. - 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. - Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit. - 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. - Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives. - Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models. <https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/> Engrave that in stone, title it the Aaron Swartz memorial, and set it before every academic library in the world.
- bogtog 2y agoI’ll preface this by saying that the current system of publishing is a natural monopoly issue… but out of all the major publishers, Elsevier is the only one to offer a public API for downloading journal articles (and an excellent one at that, which anyone can sign up for in minutes), so out of this group of parasites, I honestly hate Elsevier the least. There's a Romanian saying "A furat dar a și facut": They stole but at least they did something (usually in reference to politicians I believe but still).
- initramfs 2y ago"MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing its largest journal contract as overwhelmingly positive."
- causality0 2y agoTry explaining to a space alien the concept of "well first we tax the people to raise money, and the that money is given to scientists to conduct research, and then we sell that research back to the people on an individual basis so long as they can afford access to it."
- kkfx 2y agoSince journals "review" are know to be broken, my curiosity is simply why not ALL universities talk to each others to suddenly ALL cancel ALL their subscriptions offering a federated hosting services and open peer-review process. Ahja, companies interested in "tailored science to their business needs" might suspend their fund maybe?
- whoitwas 2y agoSometimes there's a good news story.
- DrScientist 2y agoPower has shifted - what the publishers provided was the infrastructure to publish - designing, manufacturing physical journals, marketing and distributing them. With the shift to online, the barrier to entry is much lower. There is still a role as a curator, with the an ability to garner attention ( and because the publishing barrier is lower, this has become more important ) - in a similar way to a radio DJ, but unlike music there is no need for a monetarisation platform from an authors perspective.
- imgabe 2y agoWhy aren’t all scholarly papers just published as HTML on the author’s website? This is literally what the web was made for. Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.
- oaiey 2y agoBecause the personal home page is not called Science or Nature. And is not reviewed etc. Also could be pirates. System is broken, do not get me wrong. But just a homepage is not the solution
- imgabe 2y agoSo Science or Nature peer-reviews the home page and then links to it from their page. You get the prestige from being linked to by a major journal. Everyone can publish anything, but the journals can lend credibility, which is all they do anyway.
- teekert 2y agoPerhaps this is a nice usecase for Nostr [0], everything is federated but signed with private keys(identities) that can be verifiable (ie via a custom domain/url). [0] https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pbronez 2y agoInteresting to see that MIT explicitly wants the ability to do computational analysis over published papers. Many content creators are strongly against their work being used in AI, but this policy welcomes it: > 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. https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoWhen journals aren't publishing physical copies, what are their real costs? If their costs are modest, why can't they be run as cost or cost plus co-op's rather than rent-seeking vampires exclusively for those with lots of money?
- remram 2y agoThey can.