MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract | Hacker News Reader

MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

sparcopen.org

587 pointsnabla9220 comments

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".

> 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

I'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

Undoubtedly 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena

of note AndrewFS (think cousin of NFS).. with features pertaining to systems being "offline" and "online" alternately, but still accessing the same global file / directory namespace, still reading and writing, so some type of git or cvs style merging also exists in that filesystem

Image referenced here:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ljdocs/mkmost/welcome.html

Quote:

  typescript (see Figure 4 (Sample Typescript Window)) provides an alternative to xterm. You enter commands to your shell in the input window and the results are shown in the same window where they can be scrolled, searched or saved. Typescript does not support curses like xterm does, so you cannot run vi or bash in a typescript, for example. However, you can use the tcsh or pdksh (ksh) shells.

  Typescript has several other features that I find very useful. The README for the word processing package describes how you can cause the current working directory to be kept in the title of the typescript window. Typescript is "smart" about these paths, too. Notice in Figure 4. that the path shown in the title of the window is "~", my home directory, and not a fully qualified path.

  Typescript supports use of several PC keys to make it easier to enter commands. The Cursor-Left and Cursor-Right keys can be used to edit the command I am entering (regardless if my shell supports this). The Home and End keys will move the cursor to the beginning or end of the line (or selected area). The cursor keys are also mapped to allow me to move up and down the the command history. Cursor-Up gets the previous command entered, Cursor-Down the one after.

  In my opinion an even more useful feature is command completion. If I type "ls" and then press Cursor-Up, I get the previous command that began with "ls". File completion is supported with the tab key. If I enter "ls src/tp" and then press the tab key, typescript will complete the path "src/tp" to "src/tpg-config" (in my case). It makes entering paths to files ten times easier. I love it!

  If I enter a command like "ls /etc", the window will likely fill and scroll automatically. If I want to see the beginning of the scrolled data, I must use the mouse (or Page-Up/Down keys) to scroll. However, if I enter "ls /etc control-J" (where I enter the command with a control-J keystroke, rather than the normal Enter), the command is executed, but the output is pushed to the top of the current window so I do not need to scroll.

  Typescript also allows me to create my own menus in the file ~/.shmenu. In Figure 4, you can see I have a menu card Internet on the menubar. This is from my own .shmenu file which looks like this:

...

We could have NeWs, but we got X11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

> "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.

Disrupted implies by a new competitor which I'm not sure is always possible. We need strong anti-monopoly laws and strong enforcement of them.

> This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally

Sorry, but this is a worldview that universally leads to nastiness. It's everyone's world, and just as I don't have the right to sleep in your bed (even though it's "our" world and who are you to stop "us"?) we have to have a non-low resolution and non-tribal view of situations.

There is a way to think about this that clears that very low bar, and so this level of discourse is not necessary.

It's really interesting when people doesn't notice that the view of "copyright=pepper" is pure ideology.

> ...view of "copyright=pepper" is pure...

Huh?

Your example would more apt by saying "I don't have the right to sleep in a perfect copy of your bed". You're not literally preventing others (in this case, him) from accessing resources (the bed)

In this case the "resource" is ostensibly the contents of your wallet.

The coherent way to think about this is in terms of the common good. In fact, the private good is for the sake of the common good: by being able to have private goods, we are better able to flourish (e.g., by removing conflict over common use). But because the common good is superior to private good, it is not the case that there is an absolute right to the private good. This doesn't mean principles of justice can be violated. On the contrary, it allows for them to be more perfectly realized. If you own a warehouse full of food in the middle of a famine, then it isn't theft for the hungry to take it, because you have a moral obligation to supply the starving with that food.

The trouble with the liberal notion of property rights is that it has things exactly backwards. It posits private property as primary, and the common good as a perhaps regrettable, but necessary concession of the private good. But it is the common good that is prior and justifies the private good.

So, in this case, does a company like Elsevier serve the common good?

You are exactly right, especially with the example of the famine. Maybe in some cases moderate amounts of greed and selfishness can lead to the common good (though the market), but higher moral principles must always take priority with there's a conflict. Unfortunately a lot of people miss that, especially with the astounding amounts of free market propaganda out there, hocking incomplete models and nonsense like defining good as whatever the market does.

If you find yourself in a famine with a warehouse of food, and your thought is "how can I exploit this situation for maximum profit" you are doing it wrong.

> higher moral principles must always take priority with there's a conflic

People disagree about their higher moral principles. Resolving to absoluteness requires violent resolution.

> People disagree about their higher moral principles. Resolving to absoluteness requires violent resolution.

And what do you think the implication of that is? For example, in the GGP's scenario about the warehouse of food in a famine?

That point is often used as part of a non sequitur excuse to behave badly (e.g. people don't agree on everything, therefore lets have a free for all ruled by only the market).

This sort of extreme argument is silly. Yes in that instance you need bureaucrats who parcel out what's there. But almost all the time (except in countries where governed by "social good" politics, where millions have starved to death) you aren't in a life or death situation and can just proceed normally, producing what people want to consume, or being further back in the supply chain and producing what businesses want to consume, is by far the best approach. Let people decide what they want to do and what they want to buy, and leave them alone as much as possible to achieve that.

The right analogy here is that you make 50% of the beds in the world and you are preventing anyone from buying sheets except from your own official supply.

When someone wants to read a book in a bed you manufactured, you charge the author 30%. When someone wants to watch a TV show in a bed you manufactured, you take a cut of the subscription revenue and force them to use your accounts and billing system.

When someone wants to have sex in a bed you manufactured, you have to vet them first and you only let them deploy on Tuesdays. And if they don't know the latest moves, they're out. Also they have to wear your condoms, meet people through your dating app, and pretty much obey your rules or they're banned from your beds.

And the other bed manufacturer? You get kickbacks from them. It's just the two of you, controlling all the beds in the world.

The problem is the bed shouldn't really be yours anymore. And you've extended your reach way beyond the original moment of sale into literally every activity the purchaser performs.

Why does Apple get to control what dating apps I use? Why do they get a cut of Kickstarter revenue? Why can't I write software the way I want and give it away to others? It's just silicon, after all. Whatever happened to open computing and monopoly busting? Apple's vice grip just keeps getting tighter as they ensnare more and more of the world.

I don’t think Andrew had its own display system. At least by the early 90s, ATK ran on top of X.

This would have been a bit earlier, mid-or-late-80s, assuming I'm remembering it correctly.

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.

would 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.

There are laws that make contract clauses illegal/unenforceable. Think right to work.

I 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

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>

It’s different from ex post facto, but

The state can not pass laws that alter existing contracts or refuse to enforce them. That’s very explicitly prohibited under the contracts clause.

Very much unconstitutional

> The state can not pass laws that alter existing contracts or refuse to enforce them.

"Right to work" laws would seem to be a counterexample here - states are permitted to jump in and put their thumbs on the scale in a contract between a debtor (the employer) and the union.

> "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.

I wish I could make your comment the pull quote for this discussion.

Break the an oligopoly by making them irrelevant. Academia cannot continue to feed these monsters with free resources and then also try to contain them.

>> 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.

Perhaps in industries you are familiar with. Many industries, however, would have a continued professional development disposition that benefits from continued access to fundamental research. Mine certainly does and the lack of access impoverishes that professional development.

Maybe it's the other way around - or at least a feedback loop? That is, because they're cut off from easy access to research materials, most people don't consult them past graduation -- which ensures there's no expectation or benefit from consulting academic work outside of few specific professions, effectively keeping people dumb and stumbling in the dark relative to what they'd otherwise be.

Nah. Most people barely change channels from whatever they’re watching.

Even if you made it super easy and public access, I doubt 50% or more of the population would know or care.

> Nah. Most people barely change channels from whatever they’re watching.

They very much do if it's sportsball or political news.

> I doubt 50% or more of the population would know or care.

Don't need 50% of the population. 5% would be more than enough to get the snowball rolling. All that's needed is to normalize that perusing scientific papers is how you learn about things, much like reading books or using Google is normalized.

I love your optimism.

I often find people who don't even really know where the local library is, or even begin to know what they might do with it.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It doesnt exist in their day to day because they cant access it legally. Also, the political space would profit from more open access. How can I base my arguments on facts and logic if the primary sources of the facts are not accessible to me? How can I show others the facts if they cant access the source without getting into legal trouble?

Because the scientific journals publish all of the facts and nothing but the facts?

The vast majority of my classmates in undergrad barely even understood what it meant to have online access to the library resources. They barely even bothered getting the books for their classes, much less going and researching outside of those materials directly on the syllabus.

Even a lot of my friends who got master's and Ph.D.'s barely cared about the politics of the library and journal articles. They did what they had to do to achieve their degree and got out of there. Very few cared at all about the library.

Addressing your and numerous other responses, should is doing some heavy lifting in my comment. The key factum however is the percentage of the population with tertiary academic experience. It is a supermajority.

> It's just not an issue for most people's everyday.

Sure, but if you look at any of the fairly ridiculous and designed-to-be-divisive issues that pretty much decide every bit of our political conversation.. anything can be an issue. Making the military more diverse is a good example, because while it's absolutely important, it also affects less than 1% of people directly, and less than 3% indirectly. I'd hazard a guess that open-access to research affects more than 1% of people directly, and roughly 100% of people indirectly.

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

This phrasing from GP works great because it pushes people's "freedom" buttons, and also their "curb government corruption" buttons, and for the more academically inclined, appeals to everything from accelerationist futurism to enlightened humanism. And it's not even divisive! This isn't controversial at all for anyone except the rent-seeking journal owners, and it seems like an easy win for anyone who wants to champion it. All by itself, this would be an amazing legacy, even for someone who exits political life immediately afterwards.

I don't know about that, I think the military balance-of-forces affects more people indirectly than academic publishing.

Why would you think that? Everyone gets sick and so benefits from medical research, and of course there are other kinds of research, hence the 100% number. Generously assuming everyone in the military has 1 spouse and 1 child, and assuming 1% is in the military (also generous) gives less than 3%.

I think the idea is that by maintaining a strong military presence, thus preventing us from being directly attacked on our soil (in theory), affects many more people’s lives indirectly, since they aren’t living in fear that they could be taken out at any moment.

The same is not true for many countries without a strong military presence.

And then there’s places like Costa Rica, where they somehow make it work.

If you're not aware, you may be interested in checking out https://www.osti.gov and https://www.osti.gov/search-tools

> "...all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void"

I don't think this second part you suggest is something the state can just unilaterally do if there's an existing valid contract and the other party doesn't agree. You could mandate that no contracts may be renewed and all contracts should be terminated as soon as the terms permit.

> I don't think this second part you suggest is something the state can just unilaterally do

If the state does not enforce a contract through the courts, what is it really worth?

The bigger issue is that it is a clear constitutional violation.

It specifically prohibits states from voiding contracts and ensures they must be enforced

I think the UK has some fairly tough terms along those lines. Google "green open access".

Imagine government that actually tries to help people. California seems decent.

Almost the entirety of Europe, together with big funders like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, took a good stab at battling the cartels to get them to make articles Open Access, with Plan S: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

Unfortunately, the impact seems to have been limited, primarily because the US didn't sign up to it.

So I'm afraid I don't see California being able to go on its own.

Elsevier are no doubt scum but I think that scientists share the blame. They all want to be published in the big famous journals. Which gives Elsevier the power to dictate terms.

Of course they want to get published in the big famous journals; the ones that don't lost their funding, and thus aren't scientists any more.

(Which is not to say that some aren't to blame; in particular, the ones on funding committees that still assign value to the journal/publisher names rather than the actual work produced by applicants.)

followed by regulation taxing the sale of empty digital rewritable media, with that money exclusively used to reward the sale of digital rewritable media if it provably contains a randomly selected subset of all research articles.

If a user doesn't want it, they can format the drive, or filter by subject, and get any missing articles for a subject domain from friends/whomever, but preferably first share articles with interested peers before overwriting them.

This will make the hoi polloi understand the problem, and prevent them from forgetting the lesson.

California runs big research universities, but nearly all of the research is funded by federal grants. The state has almost no power here because they’re not the ones actually paying for research… but this can easily be done by the granting agencies, and the NIH already requires open access. What the state could do is have the universities stop paying for journal access, but in the short term this would be a disaster for researchers. I am an academic PI in California.

The University of California system already cancelled it's Elsevier subscription in 2019, with an aim to making all UC research open access. Without a legislative instruction from the state, just UC librarians and administrators and whatever other UC decision-making processes.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-termina...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/01/university-ca...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00758-x

The fact that you are an academic PI in California (At UC?) and don't know this is interesting! In that I guess, for you at least, it didn't have any deleterious effects to lose access to Elsevier subscriptions (apparently it hasn't been a disaster for researchers!), but I guess also the open access efforts haven't had any obvious positive effects notable to you?

That is in fact what I was referencing when I mentioned that California universities have the power to stop paying for journal access, but not to force researchers publications to be open access.

Your information isn't quite accurate anymore, actually in 2022 Elsevier and UC reached an agreement, and they renewed the subscription. Everyone in the UCs currently has full access to Elsevier articles, even the non open access ones. It was indeed difficult and harmful to researchers during the period when access was lost.

Ah, thanks!

I wonder why MIT PI's haven't found the same disastrous effects in the past 4 years... unless the summary at OP doesn't accurately represent actual faculty feelings...

It just becomes a pain (slower) to get things, but if it's worth reading I think people still manage to get what they need.

Nowadays you can pay extra for open access even in a closed access journal and most do- so there are very few truly closed articles published anymore. It is mostly accessing older literature where it becomes a problem, but of course there are ways to get anything, especially if you are tech savvy. Most people in academia have access through some other means- their local public library, alumni access through the schools they went to previously, etc. ResearchGate has also semi-automated the 'request a copy from the author' route. People keep requesting my open access articles through that, which is annoying.

Makes sense. That doesn't sound like a disaster though?

> It is mostly accessing older literature where it becomes a problem

Not sure if this was true with UC, but MIT still has access to all Elsevier content they had before, if it was published before 2020. )

> ...leaving users with immediate access to only pre-2020 backfile content...

I'm not sure the details, but I think there are contracts where the university gets to keep access to the stuff they used to have even when cancelling contact; when transitioning from paper journals, the thought was "If we cancel our subscription we don't lose all those paper journals, and don't have to pay for them again, we want something like that."

Now I'm curious the details of this. But the OP write-up was clear that all the pre-2020 "backfile" was still accessible. Also pointing out that as time goes on this will of course be a lower percentage of all requests, since it will remain fixed at pre-2020.

(update: during the period, UC said "most articles" 2018 and earlier were still available from backfiles for them too. Perhaps most packages included such a license but not all https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/elsevier-outcome )

> ResearchGate has also semi-automated the 'request a copy from the author' route.

While the practice is standard of authors handing out free copies, in most cases I think this is either a copyright or license violation with the publisher? The authors have either assigned copyright to the publisher (and do not have permission to distribute on their own), or assigned the publisher an exclusive license that also doesn't let them distribute on their own. Unless this has changed in the past ~5 years since i was more familiar with it.

The publishers don't really try to enforce this though, as long as it's individual one-on-one which is interesting. ResearchGate is pushing the boundaries a bit there -- not legally, it's all illegal, but in terms of at what point will the scale and ease of access be high enough that publishers try to get their authors to stop giving away for free what the publisher is trying to sell. Obviously it would look bad, and they don't want make enemies of their authors.

The whole thing is a bit odd.

It made getting papers difficult enough that people often wouldn't read things they wanted to read... hard to say what the real impact of that is.

> While the practice is standard of authors handing out free copies, in most cases I think this is either a copyright or license violation with the publisher?

Journals usually allow the author to share a specific number of free copies, and even give the author a system or link to facilitate it.

There are so many quick ways around these issues.

1. The old-school method is to simply send a request for a PDF to the contact email address. I usually get 24 hr turn-arounds on requests.

2. Check pre-print servers for the research.

3. Sci-Hub

One final comment on the impact of LLMs: If the need for a very specific paper is not critical AND IF the research research had deep content before the cut-off date of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, THEN one can often get good context on a topic in a useful Q&A format I have come to love.

The implications and impact of LLM on pay-walls are enormous. Most users and scientists do NOT need a specific reference. They need some information or insight on a particular question.

In this context I find Claude highly reliable when my questions are relatively broad (e.g: “Claude, please explain Wright fixation index, F<st>, and its use in comparing genetic similarities and differences among chimpanzee populations?”). For that question and others of this type I get great first-pass answers, better than I would from all but a dozen experts in the world.

In contrast if I ask Claude for specific citations on the fixation index in chimps it is very likely to provide a confabulated reference. I will occasionally luck out but every citation you get from an LLM now needs to be vetted unless you have a RAG front-end.

All of these methods are available to almost anyone with internet access.

> I wonder how far California could go on its own in destroying the journal cartels.

The UC system cancelled it's Elsevier subscription in 2019. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-termina...

(MIT above is reporting on how it went for them cancelling in 2020. Part of the same wave, I am sure they were talking to each other).

I wonder if UC has a similar article? Looks like not yet in this series: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbun...

Would be good to see!

But anyway, UC has done it, and it hasn't destroyed the industry... yet...

Interesting how cartels seem to form by profiting off of laws that should not be laws.

Aaron 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."

My first thought as well

Surely MIT made this move at least partially due to Aaron's legacy. I hope and believe he'd be happy to see this.

Something 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.

I 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...

those 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.

Prosecutorial conduct was perhaps more important than MIT’s, although the tragedy of his death provides bountiful opportunities for condemnation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-swa...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/disappointing-unsealin...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/aaron...

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.

> 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.

What 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.

Not quite - look at Brexit negotiations , EU had clear principles, which were obvious to anyone except brexiters, and the UK position was wish-washy

The university could make them binding and difficult to rollback if they wanted.

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.

Universities usually get 40-60% of any grant money by researchers as overhead fees. This is usually negotiable but it is not like you have much to barging against administration as individual researcher/group unless you are one of the top in your field or a nobel prize candidate.

On the face of it, this sounds like a modern-capitalism take that reduces to "People don't actually have principles, they only care about money".

Which is probably correct in 95% of modern business transactions. But surely a skilled negotiator should be able to tell when they're dealing with a party for whom this assumption does not hold. That's one of the main things that being a skilled negotiator is about; the ability to adapt to this particular counterparty in this particular negotiation, instead of adhering to blanket rules.

> modern-capitalism take that reduces to "People don't actually have principles, they only care about money"1

This is not a modern-capitalism take, maybe just a modern-capitalism phrasing. If you read "money" as common unit of value (which it is), not just dollars in hand specifically, then the statement is effectively true for 99%+ of people; the few for which it doesn't hold are considered insane[0], and we try to fix them or lock away in institutions, for the safety of everyone else[1].

There's no absolute value you won't compromise if the cost of keeping it is high enough, or equivalently, the benefit of breaking it is high enough. Having principles, integrity, is a way to boost the cost of some behaviors ahead of time, so you won't be tempted to engage in them even if presented with substantial rewards. It's particularly effective if other people know your stated principles and will hold you accountable. But it's still a finite threshold that can be overcome (especially with of companies, where principles generally are just pure marketing).

A skilled negotiator understands that everyone will sell out on their principles if the reward is big enough - but they also understand that it cuts both ways. Negotiation is a dance of allocating costs and benefits so that everyone actually gets something out of it[2]. It makes little sense otherwise.

[0] - Absolute principles are like probabilities 0 and 1 in probability theory - they break the math. Or zero in general whenever you want to do multiplication or division. You don't want absolute principles, or anything you do will be defined purely by them.

[1] - And/or stuck in cults as followers; notably cult leaders tend to be very much pragmatic and money-oriented.

[2] - Relative to the non-negotiated/fought outcome. "Your money or your life" sucks for the mugging victim either way, but the victim prefers being alive to being dead and the mugger prefers theft to theft + murder, so a negotiation is still worthwhile for both.

The carrot and the stick cannot increase indefinitely. It doesn't matter how much money you lose once it's more than everything you have, and it doesn't matter how much you gain if it's enough to get everything you want except for what you're trading away.

Money is a token for value, but it is not the only such token, and different kinds of power are not fully fungible.

The principle is the basis of the reward/value and the reward/value is the basis of the principle. They're so intertwined, they can't be separated. The fact that one can always conceive a theoretical "more valuable thing" is trivially true, but does not seem practically meaningful. The idea of a principle here is that the perceived value of sticking to it, or the perceived negative value of abandoning it, is so large that realistically the counterparty will not be able to offer anything that will surpass it.

The important part was sticking to them and not just using them as a feeble bargaining chip.

Negotiations always come down to strength of need and best alternatives.

It seems Elsevier overplayed their hand. They could have given in, but then everyone would demand the same.

They probably assume it'll take other unis years to be able to get rid of them, so it's better to keep milking them for now. Once enough leave, they'll change their tunes though (by which time it may be too late).

The 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.

They'll lose more. Many universities will follow. If it's good enough for MIT...

Thr article says:

  This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year

Aren't the articles just going to get more expensive to make up for this?

Or perhaps lower quality.

Why lower quality? The money doesn't go to authors, editors or peer-reviewers.

You're certainly right about authors and peer-reviewers, but are you sure that editors don't get paid with some of that money?

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.

I have published papers in scientific journals. I had to pay page charges to the journal (well, my employer did), but I never directly paid any editor or copy-editor.

Did any copy-editing happen? Frequently it does not. Which is another issue... copy-editing on scientific papers requires major cooperation between the authors and the editor.

Yes, there was copy-editing. After peer-review and acceptance of the paper, the journal would send me marked up versions of the paper ("proofs") that made the paper conform to the journal's style, fixed typos, etc. There were often a couple of iterations concerning these changes. Finally a set of proofs would be accepted, and the paper would be published. Somebody was doing the work of making those proofs, and it wasn't the peer-reviewers. I'm pretty sure that the journals paid people to do that work, and since I was being charged hefty page fees (about $200/page) I suspect some of that money, and perhaps some subscription money, was paying for that work.

> 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.

Lower system quality? I saw job postings from Elsevier a couple years ago and considered applying. I assume there are other paid staff who contribute to quality of the articles or their delivery as well.

That would be an excellent way to initiate a death spiral for the commercial publishers.

How do these numbers work out though? MIT probably isn't the richest university there is, but I would expect it to be pretty far up there. Even if all 2000 unis spent as much as MIT did, it would only add up to roughly 80% of the profit — and I would expect most universities to have far less budget than MIT. So is there a set of big whale universities who are paying way more?

Private companies doing any kind of scientific research also have subscriptions. (A drug company for example.)

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.

According to Wiki, MIT has an endowment of ~25B USD -- #6 in the US. It is incredibly rich.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

I don't know how this ranks internationally, but I guess that US universities have the largest endowments globally.

Not specifically aimed at MIT, but wouldn’t such a large unspent endowment not (at least casually) suggest a failure to invest in research / students / etc.

Great question. As I understand, uni endowments work similar to sovereign wealth funds: You spend a portion of annual investment gains, but not the principal. So, conservatively, MIT earns 4% per year on the invested principal (25B USD), and maybe takes 3% of that return for spending. That would be and extra 0.75B USD per year in their budget. That is massive. Look at the annual budget for other world class tech unis like Swiss EFPL or ETH to understand the size of this endowment bump, relative to total budget.

Not in the slightest. An academic endowment isn't meant to be spent; the university holds the principal of the endowment and spends from the returns.

It does indeed look like they’re spending the returns, rather than just sitting on an ever increasing principal which I initially suspected.

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.

* Brownian motion. "browning motion" sounds like a euphamism for something else...

s/browning/Brownian/

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion>

TIL: Named for Robert Brown.

Unfortunately apple autocorrect doesn't know this and I didn't notice until it was too late to edit.

Email dang if it bothers you enough.

These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.

they're effectively cartels

Academia's Ticketmaster

Indeed, "data cartels"; if interested, there is a book that talks about this in detail: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205

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.

I'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.

But sci-hub stopped adding new articles years ago. It's significantly less useful than it used to be.

They did? Is there any alternative nowadays?

Annas-Archive, Nexus/Z-lib

Reportedly there are Nexus bots on Telegram but I am not sure how they work and where to find them.

> 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.

What library are the researchers getting their access through now? Are they saying the MIT library bought digital copies of all those publications?

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.

>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.,_In....

Your link is broken, should be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_....

You missed the final period

Your 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.,_...

Why would Article Galaxy be shut down? It makes it easier for Elsevier's articles to generate revenue:

https://www.researchsolutions.com/

As 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.

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.

Article 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

z library

Question: What is Elsevier’s value proposition? Could that be replicated by on open source offering?

The own the prestigious journal names, you can trivially do what they do, but you lack the prestige.

Like Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry?

No, like Lancet or Cell.

The 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.

It already is: arxiv.org.

I wish arxiv.org would have a big "Booooo" banner for papers without code.

I 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.

Papers without code are sorta by definition not reproducible or comprehensible though. And yet somehow it's not part of the peer reviewing process.

Different roles. I could have agreed if you said, say, PLOS. arXiv is a preprint repository, Elsevier publishes peer-reviewed journals.

The preprints on arxiv are read, and responded to, by plenty of peers. The question was what value Elsevier adds; I think the primary value added is just making papers available to anyone who wants to read them. Arxiv does that. (What's more, it does it for everyone, not just academics--as a taxpayer I can go on arxiv and read research that my tax money paid for. I can't do that with Elsevier published journals.) Publication in journals at this point is mainly resume padding and status signaling, not an actual value add.

PLOS is open-access, as a taxpayer you can read world-class peer-reviewed (more stringent than Elsevier journals in fact) articles in your preferred field's preferred issue.

Are there any articles on PLOS that I can't find on arxiv.org?

It's not about having access to more articles, it's about the guarantee of peer-review of whatever you read on PLOS. On Arxiv you could be reading the ramblings of a random person on the internet with zero relevance to the real world.

> On Arxiv you could be reading the ramblings of a random person on the internet with zero relevance to the real world.

The current model for traditional publishing vets each paper that is published; arxive vets each author[1] once, and then their papers can be published.

So, sure, you could be reading the ramblings of a random person, but it is quite unlikely.

I think what is more valuable is looking at the citations to the work you are reading; unless you are reading something very very new, if it is valuable at all it would be cited.

[1] When I last looked at publishing (maybe a decade ago?), arxive was vetting authors, not individual papers.

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.

A certain trust is necessary even to invest the effort to understand a paper.

Curation is, theoretically, a value-add that doesn't magically disappear with the internet. "This paper is not utter garbage" is a nice signal, if it's true.

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.

I agree! I don't think these actions need to be bundled together. I'm mainly just saying that curation is helpful, IMO.

> 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.

That's something worth signing up for.

There are prestigious open-access journals that are curated in exactly the same way Elsevier ones are. Curation is completely orthogonal to whether a paper is owned by the publisher cartels.

More importantly, prestige journals gateway career advancement, and in some cases, degree attainment, within numerous disciplines. This is covered extensively by advocates including Tim Gowers (maths) and Bjoern Brembs, both of whom blog heavily:

<https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/Elsevier/>

<https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/open-access/>

More so for some fields than others: physics, chemistry, and biology are making significant use of pre-publication and open-publication options (e.g.., arXiv, PLOS, PUBMED, BioMED). Medicine apparently less so (closed-access publishers include the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Nature). For social sciences open-access/prepub options include SSRN, RePEc, and EconStore, but much research remains in closed-access journals.

Law is almost exclusively closed-access, which is problematic in all manner of ways.

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.

Curation is not access. Curation is editorial, in terms of having a journal issue contain a selection of available new works and not every single thing posted.

Do you know how expensive open access publications are? I guarantee that editing, typesetting and curating could easily be performed for fraction of that price (and it's easy to prove it - just check how much Elsevier makes each year!). Also keep in mind that most of editors - which are responsible for curating - are not paid at all... And if you mean "curating" as in providing access to pdfs, then there is arxiv which does just that - for free.

You don't need to convince me. Convince all of the authors out there.

They have the power to send their work wherever they want. Really. They do.

The fact that they continue to choose the publishers after all of these years suggests to me that the publishers are doing something that the authors want.

And btw, who do you think would do this work for a fraction of the cost? Are you going to pay them? What if they unionize and demand a fair share of the grant money?

I feel like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy she had the power all along.

In my experience, the average Elsevier paper has worse typesetting than the average LaTeX document. At least in CS journals. The lines are too long, the font is too dense, and mathematical expressions look wrong. Springer, ACM, and IEEE are a bit better, but LIPIcs conference proceedings (where the author is responsible for typesetting) beat them all.

https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publishing/series/details/LIPIcs

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.

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).

Elsevier is a rent seeking parasite and needs to go. They add little value other than controlling access.

Why not adopt the law school approach? Let the grad students publish the journals.

It’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.

Legal academic scholarships is much small and less relevant than science scholarship. The legal publishing that matters is done by the government -- courts and legislatures.

Courts are influenced by academic scholarship.

Try 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."

Why 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.

Because 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

So 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.

Perhaps 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/

When 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?

They can.

Interesting 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/

Power 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.

Since 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?

US universities could create enough pressure on Elsevier to make them seriously reconsider their practices.

Making 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.

Can universities just do a buy-out of Elsevier and wind it down? Surely they really have the upper hand here.

There 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.

They certainly can't coordinate to create pressure on Elsevier without violating antitrust law.

Sometimes there's a good news story.

Daydream: MIT instructs its Tenure Committees to ignore any articles published (by candidates for tenure) in Elsevier journals.

There 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.

"MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing its largest journal contract as overwhelmingly positive."

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