These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
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https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-th... talks about that
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
#72These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
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You misspelled oligopoly. My guess from your comment is that you don't have a handle on how academia works, which is perfectly fine. You don't have to. But then don't hold such strong opinions because what you wrote is not even wrong.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#73Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#74Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#75I'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.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#76The 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?
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.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#77Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#78I 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.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#79Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#80These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
they're effectively cartels
Indeed, "data cartels"; if interested, there is a book that talks about this in detail: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205