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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

#101

Post by hbbio »

mncharity wrote: post #69

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…

> 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

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#103

Post by dredmorbius »

daemonologist wrote: post #98
jjtheblunt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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>

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#104

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#105

Post by jltsiren »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #32
seatac76 wrote: post #3

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

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…

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.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#106

Post by joe5150 »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #48
fabian2k wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you imagine the suits in Amsterdam are actually responsible for the quality of any given Elsevier journal? Most of the genuinely prestigious titles they publish were acquisitions. It is as clear an example of rent seeking as anyone can come up with.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#107

Post by throw10920 »

kelnos wrote: post #84
xhkkffbf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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.

Can you describe why not? Is it because a citation in academia (as opposed to corporate R&D) isn't "real" unless it comes from a big publisher?

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#108

Post by throw10920 »

kelnos wrote: post #83
xhkkffbf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#109

Post by rtpg »

mywittyname wrote: post #12
seatac76 wrote: post #3

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

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 iner…

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.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#110

Post by gumby »

hyeonwho4 wrote: post #25

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.

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.

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