MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

Some 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”.

> “our terms, take it or leave it”.

So many monopolies do this and they should all be disrupted. This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally. Google with Chrome, Apple with iPhone.

> Societal change can be so very slow, nonmonotonic, and profoundly discouraging. And yet here we are, making progress.

Encouraging, but we lost Aaron.

I 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.

>> I don’t think the average voter understand how bad it really is.

Unless you’re in academia, you’d have no idea. I spent a few years in academia while pursuing my Masters. Dropped out for various reasons and never had any idea this was such a huge thing – mainly because as a university student, you just always had access.

I got a small glimpse when I got a job a few years later working for a rather large legal publisher and how locked down they kept all of their online materials for anybody outside of academics. Its when I really understood there was a massive war raging about access to this stuff and the publishers trying to eek out every penny from granting access to materials and research that should have been just in the public domain. I didn’t stay there long and had almost forgotten about all that stuff until 2011 when it broke into the news cycle again.

You’re 100% right, this should really be a much larger issue and covered more regularly, it has massive implications on research and copyrights. Remember how long the issues of Napster and piracy have been in the media for so long (there was just another HN topic this week), but this? Not much is ever really talked about it – it just seems to linger in the shadows, which is depressing.

I think it’s because not a lot of professions access these research journals for their day to day outside of medicine, engineering, and academia.

It’s just not an issue for most people’s everyday. So it’s just not an issue.

It’s an issue pretty much anybody who’s gone through a tertiary academic institution should have some awareness of. That’s well over half the adult population these days in the US and likely EU.

Being cut off from library access was a huge shock for me on leaving uni.

Again, not really. Most professions, once you leave University, do not consult research materials. They have no reason to. And when these folks are in university, the materials are all super easily accessible.

It’s literally a non-issue for, I would bet, a majority of people. It just doesn’t exist in their day to day. Regardless of how that actually impacts the world.

> “All state funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void”

That’s already a requirement for a huge amount of research.

Yes but you still need the journal’s stamp of approval for your CV – in my past life having the paper on biorxiv did not count towards anything.

The number of papers per year in the top 20% of journals in the field was one of two metrics they assessed my career progression by (along with grant money). As long as universities and funders require similar journal-based KPIs we will not make any progress.

Correct:

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>

> 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.

The 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.

Then this is to misunderstand the customer. Administration in universities is a service to the teaching and research faculties (or departments, names vary). It’s these faculties which bring in the money, which produce the results.

As a result, universities rarely make decisions like corporations, where the CEO decides and everyone in the organisation toes the line. A policy like this is made by consultation with stakeholders, extensive and ongoing. As the article describes, this takes years even in a small university like MIT.

It’s simply not within the power of the negotiators to reach a decision outside that policy: they’d be ignored by the university faculties, who would then make their own individual arrangements, and the funds available to the negotiators would not be agreed to (and far worse outcomes are possible, efforts by ‘the administration’ to make decisions against consensus are a common reason for the head of a university to be sacked). If the negotiators genuinely can’t reach agreement, then negotiations have to be suspended, the progress reported to many interested parties within the university, and then a new consensus reached about the negotiation parameters.

Now no two universities are the same, and the degree of centralisation varies. But I hope this helps you understand that the ‘policy’ referred to in this article was itself the result of years of negotiation, and “you can change them at any time; they are your choices” doesn’t describe the situation.

The MIT principles framework (linked in TFA) is here: 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/>

Engrave that in stone, title it the Aaron Swartz memorial, and set it before every academic library in the world.

However there is also the loss of prestige for Elsevier.

MIT is one the the preeminent universities in the world, perhaps the preeminent one.* The loss of MIT gives permission to other institutions who may be more concerned about reputation to do the same (they don’t want to generate whispers of “did they do this because they are having money troubles?”). It may also cause authors to submit other prestigious journals before elsevier ones.

* really any change in the top 10 ranked schools from year to year are just a kind of browning motion. They are as a group equally prestigious.

Nothing against the overall sentiment, and even considering the audience here, but surely the quote below isn’t serious:

MIT is one the the preeminent universities in the world, perhaps the preeminent one.

Yeah, that’s an odd claim when it is more the adequate to say that MIT is closely observed by other technical institutions worldwide.

The difference in approach, outcome and size of expenditure between MIT and the University of California System in their negotiations with Elsevier interests university libraries everywhere when considering their own publications strategies. It is great that both institutions have been open about their budgets, their negotiation stance, and the outcome.

MIT is “tiny” by international standards. According their own site they have less than 12,000 students.

The largest universities are distance learning organisations and large groups of affilianted colleges or university systems.

E.g. Indira Gandhi National Open University has an enrollment of 7.1 million students (distance learning) and National University of Bangladesh about 2 million (affiliate colleges). Iran’s Islamic Azad university system has ~1m.

The US also has a long list of much bigger universities/university systems. E.g. SUNY, Cal State, University of Phoenix, UC, UNC all have more than 200k students each.

So I’d imagine MIT makes up far less than 1/2000th of the student and staff population.

Yes. The “editors” for most such publications do not edit, they make publishing decisions.

Copy-editors are expensive, and paid for by the researchers, not the journals.

> The “editors” for most such publications do not edit, they make publishing decisions.

My spouse is an editor at an academic journal in her field and does some of both. In papers selected for publication, she does exert editorial input. In terms of remuneration, it is a compensated position; but how the money flows between the academic society, the journal and Elsevier, that part is lost on me.

Asymmetry of power? Copyright gives each author absolute power over their work. 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.

The reality is that the power asymmetry is the opposite.

What are these large costs for playing what game? Again, this isn’t formally controlled by the publishers at all. The snobbery you imagine comes from the promotion and hiring committees and Elsevier and the other publishers aren’t on those committees.

And you might ask why do the promotion and tenure committees act with such imagined snobbery? They’re all experienced academics. It’s not like the schools are putting some randos on these committees. It’s easily possible for some of these committees to have 300 collective years of experience in the field. And so if they’re valuing some Elsevier journals more than a rando PDF FTP site, well, I think we’ve got to respect their opinion. Or are you saying they’re just puppets and fools of Elsevier?

> 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.

Citation? The constitution guarantees that the author retains completely control over their work. That’s what copyright is all about.

And they don’t need to work with any formal publisher at all. Open source technology and the Internet makes it very easy for anyone to distribute their own work for free. And many do.

But for some reason people still want to pay the page fees. I think this is a signal that most academics are getting something for their money.

You are so confidently wrong it’s embarrassing.

Any grad student–who does the grunt work in academia–will tell you they would not be allowed to put up their research online without their lab’s permission. And grad students sign a form that anything they say and write is owned as IP by university anyways.

Please look into how the academic sausage is made before spouting more misinformation as well as specious takes on spherical-cow free market theories. Your comments are all over this thread and I can’t mentally unread them.

No, they don’t. Not unless you want to sabotage your own career.

There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of science, and you need to publish in the most reputable journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in most cases.

So you’re confirming that somehow the best publishers somehow manage to provide something of value. The people judging your career are the ones you’re complaining about and somehow they’re choosing to respect a few publishers.

Instead of just imagining that Elsevier is somehow bad, you might ask yourself why these committees respect their journals so much. What are they doing that’s right?

This is simply not true. Funding agencies, revieweds and universities incentivize the researchers to publish in “high-impact” journals.

If researchers weren’t pushed by institutions to publish more and more and in highly ranked journals things would be much better.

The problem is nobody wants to do the move (researchers, institutions, funding agencies), so publishers (Elsevier isn’t alone, ACS, Springer, Wiley, they all do that) increase the prices as much as they can because nothing happened when they did. And even now, as was shown by a comment above only a tiny percentage of their clients take action…

They choose the journals because if they don’t, their career doesn’t advance.

It’s a classic collective-action problem: you need a large portion of researchers to more or less simultaneously stop doing it. Good luck with that.

The journal system/cartel is an effective oligopoly.

> They choose the journals because if they don’t, their career doesn’t advance.

Is this basically saying that publishing in non-big-journals (e.g. ArXiV) doesn’t really “count” as citations? If so, then that’s probably the right language to use here – that citations are a currency that only big (expensive, monopolistic) publishers can actually pay for papers in.

Interesting recent history from Wikipedia: (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.

> 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-abou…

Wonderful.

“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.

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.

The article states that MIT pays $300,000 annually for individual request fees, far less than the prior contract amount.

Large 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.

Network effect. “Everyone” subscribed to Elsevier, so if you wanted your papers to get visibility and citations, you tried to get it published in their journals.

They are a relic of a bygone era. They made sense when journals were physical publications in the library. Elsevier was the one-stop-shop for all of the major academic journals. But with the internet, they make less sense and kept their position through inertia and rent seeking behavior.

I think the issue is more than that though, because if the physical aspect were only the barrier, they should have disappeared by the time the Internet came along.

I think (and this is only my honest, outsider perspective) that the issue is, and always was, about trust. As in: who is this dude publishing this paper about high-energy particle physics? I don’t know him, so I don’t trust him. But I do know about Science, and Nature, and other Journals, so I’m gonna use them. That’s why Elsevier and Springer and other publishers continued to exist.

Problem is, science isn’t about trust. It’s about knowledge, and more importantly, truth. But how do get the truth? Well, there’s witnesses, and evidence, and Reproducibility™ of statements to produce facts. Y’know, science itself. If we could somehow resolve the reproducibility crisis of science, I think we would be one step closer to ending the parasitic mono-duo-oligo-whateverpoly of these publishers. Because then it would not be about who I trust to move forward the science enterprise. Instead it would be about facts themselves, and about confirming, via evidence and reproducibility of these facts, that would promote a piece of statement into knowledge. And that is how science should always have been, since the very beginning.

But the reproduction of experiments is a problem in itself, that might be the cause of the ‘relying-on-trust’ issue. Since not all experiments are a simple ./build-and-run.sh script, and some involve a lot of money (think anything in medicine, physics, geology, oceanography, and the list goes on to ∞), it ends up being about someone that is reputable and reliable that had money and did the experiment and published in some journal that I know.

Anybody can curate. Curating a work doesn’t require an exclusive copyright to publish that work. Michelin curates restaurants without charging their guests for admission.

You can even start a subscription newsletter titled “rtpg’s best of Arxiv”, containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. It could become very prestigious for researchers to be mentioned in your newsletter, and your own reputation will hinge on the quality of the papers you link to (and the ones you leave out). Even so, this service still doesn’t require that you host or own copyright to those works!

Nor does this arrangement require that any one work be found on only one single curator’s shortlist and no others.

For institutions, it’s that Elsevier gives access to some of the papers their researchers need. The question is then how Elsevier got the papers and I think there’s a bunch of parts to it.

Firstly, it can be by providing a good service. Before the war, most papers were published by learned societies and such societies tended to not be very good publishers – they would be slow with long backlogs and unable to publish the volume of papers scientists wanted published at the time. By providing a faster service they could get papers.

Second it can be by offering a service at all. If you have a Springer journal and an Elsevier journal for some field, they can both get papers because researchers need to publish to advance their careers and one journal will not be big enough for all the papers in that field

Third can be from being a preferred choice by being prestigious, which can matter even without impact factor arithmetic – hiring committees made of peers can still know which journals in the field are more prestigious / harder to be published in, and take that into account when hiring. It’s not totally clear to me how to become prestigious. One way is by inertia – if you were prestigious before you probably still are. Something some publishers (Pergamon Press, but maybe others too?) did was owning and dining prominent scientists to get them to sign exclusive contracts to edit new journals. Perhaps this association via the editorial board could improve the journal’s prestige or otherwise get desirable papers in.

It does seem true to me that scientific publishers used to provide a pretty valuable service, and I think if one were in a government looking at all the government money going to the journals via universities, one might be able to feel that the improvement to the rate of scientific exchange was worth it.

It feels that today, a lot of that value comes from various kinds of inertia/lock-in: Elsevier has the papers and scientists must publish in Elsevier journals to advance their careers, which maintains the prestige of those journals and means the publisher continues to have the papers.

Editing, typesetting and curating are expensive. Yes, authors can do this and they contribute quite a bit, but it’s not enough to support the high quality documents produced by Elsevier.

Yes, tex-savvy authors can do a pretty good job but it’s just not the same. That’s one reason authors choose to pay the page charges.

Curating is also surprisingly important. Sure, you can often get some author to send you a free PDF from something written 10-20 years ago. But it’s also not uncommon for the author to be very unresponsive. Maybe they left academia. Maybe they’re lazy. Who knows? But I know that I can’t count on getting a free PDF from any author.

I’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).