These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
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> It's a free market.
Free market is not magic.
Do you want to learn how network effects combine with coordination problem?
MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
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Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#62These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
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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...
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#63The 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.
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?
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#64Daydream: 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.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#65Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#66The 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.
Aren't the articles just going to get more expensive to make up for this?
Or perhaps lower quality.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed that it's a free market. It looks a lot like a market where entrenched players have excessive power.
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According to the article, Elsevier demands that the author signs over the copyright. So no, they don't retain complete control.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#68The 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.
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.)
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#69Some 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".
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#70Interesting 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.