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Education Science

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations (mit.edu) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
New submitter gam shares an announcement from MIT: Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.

Developed by the MIT Libraries in collaboration with the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research and the Committee on the Library System in October 2019, 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. It affirms the overarching principle that control of scholarship and its dissemination should reside with scholars and their institutions, and aims to ensure that scholarly research outputs are openly and equitably available to the broadest possible audience, while also providing valued services to the MIT community. More than 100 institutions, ranging from multi-institution consortia to large research universities to liberal arts colleges, decided to endorse the MIT Framework in recognition of its potential to advance open scholarship and the public good. "We hope to be able to resume productive negotiations if and when Elsevier is able to provide a contract that reflects our community's needs and values and advances MIT's mission," said Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries. "In the meantime, we will continue to use the framework to pursue new paths to achieving open access to knowledge..."
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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations More

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

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  • DIAF, Elsevier! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @05:43PM (#60172872)

    May MIT's action be the start of a trend.

    • They will be. The dinosaur clearing houses and publishing companies don't have the leverage that cable companies do to prop up their dying empires.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Elsevier doesn't care. They've been converting many of their journals to open access anyway. They've realized that it's much more profitable to charge authors $3000 per article than it is to charge libaries suscription fees. Although subscriptions are nice for the stability, growth is limited: there just aren't as many new libraries opening as there are academics who need to pump out publications.

        I'm sure Elsevier would love to get MIT coming AND going, but they'll settle for coming.

        • Pretty much all the big players recognize that APCs aren't the future. Don't get me wrong, Elsevier is going to milk both subscriptions and APCs for as long as they can, but even they aren't betting on that in the long term. That's why they have been buying up research and education infrastructure/assistance like Mendeley and 3D4Medical (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/elsevier#section-lists-featuring-this-company).

          Whether we like it or not, Elsevier is likely to continue to exist, just in a dif

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            At least those are optional services that you can take or leave, and there are lots of open source alternatives.

            Elsevier's other diversification efforts are more ironic. It's common to claim that scientific publishing is expensive because of the archiving and storage costs, and journals need to charge high fees because of it. Yet Elsevier has decided that the profits lie in... archiving and storage, signing lucrative data management contracts with universities.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by reg ( 5428 )

      The University of California system did this last year...

  • mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @06:01PM (#60172956)

    Not being able to access taxpayer-funded papers Elsevier got is a hardship for MITters. Fortunately, there is a mirror [sci-hub.se].

  • The current fee structure made sense in the past but nobody gets their journal articles from dead trees anymore. And they don't even pay reviewers so where is all the money going?

  • A fair and sustainable price (Score:4, Interesting)

    by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @06:24PM (#60173050)

    From MIT's Framework

    "Terms that represent a fair and sustainable price for the value-added services provided by publishers."

    Elsivier is free to charge as much as they want, but they got greedy considering they aren't the actual content-providers. Maybe there's a lesson in there for other industries where the 'platform' demands too much of a cut...Grubhub, Uber, etc.

    True monopolies like iPhone apps are of course still immune.

  • A Long Time Coming. (Happy to answer questions) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @06:48PM (#60173134)
    Been a lurker for many years but since I am one of the people who served on the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research, I thought I would finally make an account and comment. If people have questions about what went into this, what our thought process was, what the goal is, I'm happy to do what I can to answer.

    In general, though, I would like to state that this has been a long time coming. MIT has been working towards this for 4+ years, figuring out exactly what compromises were acceptable, what we want the future to look like with regards to OA, and building support among community (the faculty in particular, students and staff were largely on board from the get-go). Academia still has a long ways to go IMHO, but this yet another step in the right direction (Europe's Plan S and University of California's rejection of Elsevier's terms were two other big steps.) The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is also working towards moving us forward from the research funding side of things too.

    • Been a lurker for many years but since I am one of the people who served on the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research, I thought I would finally make an account and comment.

      Thou shalt not judge a /. poster by their User Number. Mine is just under a million, but I had been lurking for years, but just not posting - then the News Groups got effectively shut down. At the time I did not even realize that User Numbers were a thing with slashdotters, or I could have just created an account for the hell of it in the low, low hundreds of thousands.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Do you have a comment on why MIT's policy stops short of endorsing the position of the machine learning community that subscription AND pay to publish journals have no role in scientific publishing?

      https://openaccess.engineering... [oregonstate.edu]

      • Re:A Long Time Coming. (Happy to answer questions) (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @08:12PM (#60173350)
        The honest answer is compromise. It is an unfortunate fact that not every field is as progressive when it come to open access as machine learning (computer science in general, really) or physics or mathematics. It is definitely true that many members of the task force (myself included) felt strongly that we don't want to move from the current closed access model (where anyone can submit articles but only the rich can read them) to an APC model (where anyone can read articles but only the rich can submit them). I am hopeful that we can keep moving in a direction that avoids both of these, or at bare minimum avoids the >$1K APCs that some journals *cough* nature *cough*

        An example of a legitimate concern that some fields have, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, is that the professional societies use a paid journal (either subscription or APC) in order to finance their primary annual conference, since they have a lot less government and industrial research funding. My preference is that universities would just provide some amount of subsidies to these conferences directly rather than going through the journals in this way, but it is certainly true that it is harder to figure out exactly who should pay how much.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          I think institutions like MIT could do a lot of good by starting their own journals, in the spirit of the machine learning ones. One of the biggest issues with new journals is that nobody wants to submit to them because they don't have the brand recognition or impact factor. MIT could leverage its name to overcome that. The institute also has the resources to support the small cost of publishing (about $1.50 / paper for those machine learning journals, mostly for the cost of a DOI). MIT also has publishing

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thomst ( 1640045 )

      Nemo_the_Null confessed:

      Been a lurker for many years but since I am one of the people who served on the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research, I thought I would finally make an account and comment.

      Assuming you are who you claim to be (this is the cesspool that used to be Slashdot, after all), I just want to say, "Thank you for your service." Please extend those thanks to your colleagues on Task Force.

      And let me just add that this move is long overdue. I'm certain a lot of the hesitation on your part to take this step has been because of the negative effect taking such a stand unjdoubtedly will have on both MIT's student population and on your faculty colleagues who are still a

      • Re:A Long Time Coming. (Happy to answer questions) (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @09:14PM (#60173594)
        I certainly shared your disappointment that there wasn't such a cascade (as of yet at least). UC's declaration was certainly a big jolt of encouragement for us. It also helped shake loose some of the more reluctant parties to take a firm stand.

        One major issue that we have in the US is that (according to our general counsel at least), universities can't do too much in the way of directly collaborating on an Elsevier boycott, because that would be considered a price-setting cartel. Europe hasn't had this problem since most of them negotiate their journal subscriptions through a government agency. For better or worse, you can't sue a government agency under antitrust laws.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OldBus ( 596183 )
        I think there will be a cascade, it just might not happen as quick as you expect. Generally, academic libraries are in multi-year deals with publishers like Elsevier. I work in a UK academic library where negotiations on the latest round have started with some publishers, but the Elsevier contract has not yet started negotiations. I don't know the results of any given contract negotiation, but over the next few years and over the world things will change.

    • Four years is a long time.

      Did MIT consider inventing a new publishing system and supporting it with leadership and resources?

      • Re:A Long Time Coming. (Happy to answer questions) (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @09:44PM (#60173702)
        Yes and no. MIT actually did invent its own publishing system that it continues to support and use for all sorts of things (https://www.pubpub.org/). The OA Task Force used it for publishing our white papers and reports (eg. https://mitoataskforce.pubpub.... [pubpub.org]) and even getting feedback on the drafts. Obviously getting something to catch on at scale is difficult and we didn't want to put all of our eggs the basket of rolling our own "new universal standard" (https://xkcd.com/927/).

        If I had to bet, I think that the "publishing platform of the future" is already here. It's called arXiv (and all the other pre-print servers out there). Over time, I expect we will get a more reliable funding system down for them and we will start to build added functionality on top of them. The various professional orgs and communities that currently run peer review will still do that, but it will show up as "Peer Reviewed by X" flags on the preprint platform, rather than on some completely separate journal (though separate websites will likely continue to exist to make scanning through just that one org's papers easier). But maybe I'm wrong and we will end up with something else.

    • I haven't seen any good discussion of the pros and cons anywhere. Can you point me to any articles/reviews? Would you also like to summarize your own sense of the pros and cons?

      Speaking of transparency in science, science departments are not very transparent at all in the recruiting of graduate students, especially vis-a-vis graduation rates (counting a student who drops out with a Masters degree a "successful graduate"), graduation rates per adviser, exam pass rates, job opportunities, and the hiding of i

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 )
        This a batch of issues that I certainly care a great deal about and have been working over the past ~2 years to address (completely separately from the OA Task Force). I would point you towards FAARM (https://www.cmu.edu/stugov/gsa/Blog/faarm.html), which is an effort involving the graduate student governments from several schools, including MIT and CMU, to advocate for the federal research funding agencies to require more on this front (since it is hard to get the schools to do it themselves one by one). T

        • I'm very glad to hear that you are working on these issues as well. Thank you!

          I have tried to work with my university to get them to gather data by asking for surveys, anonymous or otherwsise, of the graduate student body, about their experiences in general and with their advisers; to provide exit interviews with graduate students when they leave the university, whether they leave with a degree or not; and to provide the opportunity to give feedback about their advisers in the form of course evaluations. Th

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 )
        Forgot to reply to your question about pros and cons. Since Slashdot doesn't allow for editing of comments (didn't expect to run into that oft-complained about issue *this* quickly), here is a separate comment.

        My best recommendation is Peter Suber's book titled Open Access. It is available open access itself, aptly enough, at the MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access, scroll down a bit and on the left here are download links in various formats) (Peter Suber is not himself from MIT, for c

        • Suber's book [harvard.edu] looks good, and I've read through the overview [earlham.edu].

          I do have some concerns that I'd like to see addressed.

          As the primary argument for open access goes, publicly funded research should be publicly available. This ignores the fact that the individual graduate students have an ownership interest apart from the public funding. While some students are paid as a Research Associate, many are not, and all of their time spent in doing research is their own and should be appropriately attributed to them. Eve

          • I really do suggest you read Peter Suber's book, because it addresses many of these complaint. Keep in mind that Nature's costs are an outlier and Nature is one of the most intransigent players when it comes to OA.

            Regarding rights, moving towards OA actually protects certain rights. Traditionally, publishers required that you assigned copyright of your work to them. This meant that you couldn't substantively reuse your own articles in, say, your dissertation. One of the plank's of MIT's framework is tha

  • American Chemical Society (Score:3)

    by methano ( 519830 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @08:29PM (#60173422)
    It will be interesting to see how things go with MIT and the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS is more of a major publishing house than a society for the benefit of its members.

    Member for 40+ years.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Nemo_the_Null ( 6951528 )
      The OA Task Force heard this sentiment several times for our chemistry brethren. Despite this, ACS has actually proven thus far to be relatively willing to work with us (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2020/march/acs-signs-innovative-north-american-open-access-agreement-with-mit.html).

      Maybe they just have less market power than Elsevier to stand on. Also helps that MIT is no bit player themselves.

  • Good for MIT. It's a shame they didn't figure this out in time to avoid helping the FBI kill Aaron Swartz for downloading papers. :(

  • Now do the same for Nature Publishing Group and Springer. The three big bullies that pays zilt and eats all.

  • Remember when you created several magazines, aimed at doctors, that contained nothing but fake articles and studies, to get them to prescribe Merck products despite being a bad choice?
    Yes, I mean the ones where you got caught.

    And, yeah, the entire company should have been shut down right there and then. To root out the corporate culture that breeds things like that. They have no business being allowed anywhere near any education whatsoever.

  • Proprietary knowledge is fundamentally anti-science. It is hard to believe that point has ever been controversial.

    High praise for MIT.

  • Too much publically funded research is paywalled. That SHOULD be illegal. Thank you MIT for holding on this and hopefully others will follow suit.

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