
MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations - davrosthedalek
https://news.mit.edu/2020/guided-by-open-access-principles-mit-ends-elsevier-negotiations-0611
======
LeifCarrotson
Here is the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts:

[https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/](https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/)

It requires that:

1\. No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open
access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals.

2\. 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.

3\. Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional
repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms
that facilitate immediate deposit.

4\. 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.

5\. Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and
accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital
archives.

6\. Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for
value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models.

Not surprising that Elsevier couldn't meet these requirements. #2 in
particular seems antithetical to Elsevier's philosophy.

What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the
framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have
an Elsevier contract.

~~~
enriquto
> What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the
> framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have
> an Elsevier contract.

If you ever tried to dig deep into the internals of a large organization, you
will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-
contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power. At least, this was my
experience.

For a mathematician used to third-excluded logic, it may seem impossible,
since you can prove anything from "p and not p". Yet, these organizations
manage to not be able to do arbitrary things from contradictory inputs, but
somewhat sane things (some of the time).

~~~
Nextgrid
> they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules

This is caused by managers' and middle-managers' performance metrics being
tied to the wrong outcomes.

The top layer of management's target is the desired outcome. The bottom
layer's (the worker) target is also clear, it's to do whatever _their_ manager
says to do.

In the middle is where it often breaks down; their objectives are short-
sighted and while it works out for their _own_ career, it rarely benefits the
top level target. At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of
resources and unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here) and
at worst it goes completely _against_ the target set at the top level.

Imagine it as an eventually-consistent system. If you don't change anything
and give the system enough time it will eventually achieve its goal. The
problem is that the "time" we're talking about is measured in years if not
decades and during that period the system is stuck in a contradictory state.
Endless restructurings and other external factors often reset this "timer" so
the system is even more likely to stay in the contradictory state forever
(some other "systems" _depend_ on _this_ system staying in the contradictory
state), despite theoretically advancing towards the end-goal.

~~~
JackFr
> At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of resources and
> unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here)

If the COVID-19 lockdown has taught us anything, it's that probably a full
third of our economy is bullshit jobs. We're at best self-perpetuating
economic 'nice-to-haves', at worst parasitic rent seekers, probably somewhere
in between, whose real role is simply to distribute GDP more widely, while
pretending to add value to society.

~~~
WJW
There's a ton of nice-to-have professions that are not strictly necessary,
like musicians and decorative fountain builders. That is _a good thing_! It's
clearly possible to live in a giant grey barrack and eat nothing but soylent
but it's not what 99% of the population would prefer. If anything, it would be
good for society to make the percentage of not-essential-but-nice-to-have as
high as possible.

~~~
burtness
I dont think the parent comment's bullshit jobs are the same as your
definition of nice-to-have jobs, at least assuming parent is talking about
David Graeber's use of the term.

Bullshit jobs are ones that could disappear and the impact would unnoticeable
or minimal for an organisation's output. Nice-to-have (for society?)
professions still have value, otherwise they wouldn't be nice - if all the
musicians disappeared people would definitely notice.

I'd also contest the idea that cultural labour is unnecessary. Lots of people
in lockdown have depended on all kinds of music, TV, film, etc to maintain
their mental health. This seems to go beyond preference, even if not everyone
needs the same or as much cultural produce to survive healthily.

~~~
ironmagma
It’s roughly the same concept. Those people were hired for a reason, even if
it wasn’t a fully rational one. Just as musicians are the quality of life
improvers of society at large, so too are code janitors to an IT team.

~~~
toshk
The idea of bullshit jobs started a few years ago mostly based upon the idea
that the people doing themselves felt like they were doing bullshit jobs, and
therefore not feeling fullfilled.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Douglas Adams got there in the 80s with his Golgafrincham B Ark storyline.

~~~
alasdair_
>Douglas Adams got there in the 80s with his Golgafrincham B Ark storyline.

If COVID-19 has taught us nothing else, it's that (as Adams warned us)
"telephone sanitizers" are absolutely essential.

------
underdeserver
I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still
need to exist.

Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single
paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers
and edit the papers into a monthly journal.

Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a
thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a Google Doc. And if
you want it printed, there are shops that can do that for you for a small fee
as well.

This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and could be 100%
funded by those who are still willing to pay for paper versions or by tiny
contributions from the top 100 universities.

~~~
abhv
I'm an academic.

For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of
Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks:

* There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now? I'm sure that many of you can devise solutions to this, but they will be costly, and they will need constant labor to implement. How do you pay for this? It is OK when 20,000 researchers in a field are downloading papers every once in a while, but what happens when every student in the world wants to read these? The bandwidth charge becomes non-trivial. It seems like it needs to be outsourced, and some commercial entity with experience handles it.

* The tenure process is slow to change. Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors" in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure committees in older institutions use these metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not stupid: it is just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals represent "the highest quality work" and thus use the presence of those publications to judge researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in Elsevier/Springer journals.

When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was
from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder how it is going to work now
that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way...

~~~
underdeserver
I'm a random industry software engineer. :)

> In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results.
> But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a
> few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

Printed versions + digitally signed and timestamped PDFs. This is a solved
problem in the world, at least up to the level that Springer can solve it.

> How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now?

I trust MIT and Harvard to keep PDFs and printed versions available much more
than I trust Elsevier or Springer to be around in 75 years.

> Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact
> factors" in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure committees in
> older institutions use these metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not
> stupid: it is just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are
> not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals represent "the
> highest quality work" and thus use the presence of those publications to
> judge researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in
> Elsevier/Springer journals.

I don't disagree. This is why the change and the first wave of papers will
likely come from already-tenured professors, who still publish high impact
papers.

> When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was
> from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder how it is going to work now
> that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way...

Now imagine the same situation, except you don't need your IP to be from MIT.

~~~
mywittyname
Just pointing out that Elsevier is ancient in business terms, it's origins as
a publisher goes back to the mid 16th century and the modern version of the
company is from around the 19th century. I'd be surprised if the company isn't
around when I die.

In addition to publishing, they (RELX) is one of the biggest companies you've
never heard of. They provide information systems to governments all over the
world and span multiple market segments. I guarantee you're in a dozen of
their databases right now. And that your local, state, and federal taxes all
funnel into their pockets in one form or another. Along with some of the money
you pay for various insurances throughout the year. When you buy a house, rent
an apartment, get a job, or basically have any major event in your life, they
get paid.

~~~
njharman
It's not so much as they aren't an established company it's that that their
business model has been broken/bypassed by technology. They've been reduced to
being a middle-man that obstructs value rather than providing it.

The only part of biz model left is "prestige" (very fickle), "customer lock in
/ inertia" (which is already going away re: OA), and lobbying government to
prop up/expand their monopoly (ever extending/expanding copyrights, which is
the one thing that doesn't seem they will ever lose on cause ever other
bypassed dinosaur broke ass business model publisher spends tons on it).

~~~
mywittyname
I disagree. It seems like you only know Elsevier as a publisher of journals,
but that's only about 1/3 of their overall business. They (RELX) provide a lot
of useful services to companies and governments.

About half their revenue and profits come from Risk and Legal services, which
are not things you hear about in the news. They offer services for police,
airlines, legal firms, insurance companies, accounting firms Hell, they have
an analytics tool for agricultural businesses. They also have enough money to
throw around in these spaces to prevent any startups from getting large enough
to be a threat.

------
whatshisface
An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be that anyone
who's still publishing in closed-access journals will be at a severe
disadvantage in getting cited compared to people who publish open access and
make preprints available.

~~~
calvinmorrison
probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways
to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite,
maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your
network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it

~~~
whatshisface
I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for
things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to
fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes
to my point.

~~~
mattkrause
This....doesn't seem crazy to me? _Somebody_ might have known it in the 1800s,
but any given modern reader may not.

You could cite the original source, but it might be inaccessible (and possibly
not very complete). A modern article could be easier for the reader,
especially if it's a review. Sometimes you might just want a few examples of a
phenomenon too, so the choice doesn't matter much.

~~~
whatshisface
No, I'm talking about when the fact was fully understood and widely known in
the 1800s.

------
obiefernandez
Further indications that Aaron Swartz didn't die completely in vain...

~~~
ramraj07
Just came across his name yesterday when I was looking for python markdown
parsers!

Thinking about what happened to him, I'm a bit ambivalent. He was a great
dude, for sure, but what he did with downloading the entire JSTOR database
sneakily does sound a bit out there. It's definitely a Robinhood move, but
Robinhood also had an arrest warrant on him. Expecting no less of a
retaliation would have been naive at best.

Many other hackers have been arrested, spent jail time and have come out of it
to still go on with their life. I suppose you have to know which side of the
law (agreeable or not) when you go the hacker route. He unfortunately elected
to end his life over this. That is a great, great loss, but I'm not convinced
we should start judging things in the world because someone killed themselves
over it.

~~~
woofie11
There are two pieces here: How the legal system behaved, and how MIT behaved.
What you're saying makes 100% sense for an aggressive prosecutor. On the other
hand, MIT was behaving in a way which was pure evil.

To go back to the Robinhood analogy, I would expect the Sheriff of Nottingham
to go after Robinhood with perfect dedication -- that's his job. On the other
hand, if Friar Tuck made it his life's work to go after Robinhood, that'd be a
different story.

~~~
nawwal
I don't totally understand why there's so much hate on MIT for this, so
consider this more of an inquiry rather than an outright defense of what
happened and let me know if I'm missing something critical:

Based on what I know, Aaron Swartz - someone with no affiliation to MIT -
abused MIT's open campus/network policies and tried to download all of JSTOR
_by hiding a laptop in a closet_. At best, this is at least something sketchy
to do by someone with no connection to the university. MIT discovered this,
turned the matters over to the police, Swartz got caught, and the
(overzealous) prosecutors took it from there. MIT did not "make it [its]
life's work to go after [Swartz]". You can certainly criticize it for not
trying to help him, especially given MIT's hacker-friendly culture and the
fact that his actions did not hurt anyone, but I think it's unfair to have
expected MIT to make a stand against the prosecutor/criminal justice system
and predicted Swartz's suicide, after he rejected the 6 month minimum-security
prison deal and decided to go to trial instead.

I'm all for open access, but Swartz's methods were at least a bit questionable
and he should have expected some repercussions should he get caught (I'm sure
he did, hence the hiding of the laptop). And in the end, blaming MIT for being
neutral in a politically-charged case and for Swartz's death seems unfair, it
is an academic and research institution after all, not a public defender.

~~~
woofie11
A few corrections:

1) Saying Aaron had no affiliation to MIT does not reflect the reality of the
situation. MIT, at the time, had an open door policy. There were a lot of
people who hung out at MIT -- accepted, participating, contributing members of
the MIT community (often actively participating in running MIT classes or
doing MIT research), who just happened to not be in a formal role (student,
faculty, etc.). MIT has clamped down on that since, but it's a lot of what
made MIT awesome in its heyday. The reason the MIT community was so offended
by the MIT administration is because it was an attack by the administration on
a member of the community.

2) Saying MIT took a neutral role is also false. JSTOR took a neutral role.
MIT actively pressed charges.

3) As unreasonable as Swartz' actions seem in 2020 mainstream culture, they
were not out-of-line with MIT culture of the time. People were encouraged to
actively pushed boundaries, and property was a bit more communal. As an
undergrad, I might go into a lab I had no affiliation with, and use equipment
to build something. I wouldn't do that if it was indicated that wasn't okay,
but for the most part, there was an expectation that if the Institute had a
classroom no one was using, you could use it to run a community activity. If
there was a lab with equipment you needed, unless there was a sign posted to
the contrary, then you should just made sure you left it better than when you
found it (and if it was something like a bandsaw, had the safety training you
needed). I was trained on equipment in a several labs I had no formal
affiliation with, and regularly used them for personal projects. This was 100%
okay and everyone knew about this.

4) I don't have any reason to believe Swartz hid a laptop in a closet. He left
a laptop in a closet. There were some things he did -- like spoofing IPs --
which were less transparent. But there were plenty of times I'd left equipment
connected to random places on the MIT network for long-running network
operations, never nefariously. It's an unlocked closet with an ethernet drop.
No one in the community would think twice about using it for e.g. a large
download overnight.

A lot of these things would not be done in 2020 MIT. Not a million years. The
administration's handling of Swartz was part of this culture change, and a lot
of MIT's soul died in the process. It has had a continuing chilling effect on
the culture of the MIT community. What's really evil is that the MIT
administration continues to uses Swartz as an example to intimidate community
members into compliance with what it wants them to toe the line.

~~~
peterwwillis
> an attack by the administration on a member of the community

Prosecuting someone for breaking into your network and using it for illegal
activities is attacking them?

> What's really evil is

Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore
everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions.
"Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the
laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it, since
if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be changed.

If we all really cared enough about open access journals, there would be a
world-wide boycott of science education until a national law was passed
blocking all public funding to anything but open access. But that's not going
to happen, and we all know why: it's not evil _enough_ for us to drop
everything and use collective action, but we still want to _pose_ it as evil
because we're really angry, and we're really angry because we don't know
enough about how it all works to find a better solution.

~~~
woofie11
> Prosecuting someone for breaking into your network and using it for illegal
> activities is attacking them?

It depends on where you draw the boundaries between "yours" and "ours." My
family can walk into my closet. A stranger can't. From the perspective of most
of the MIT community, Aaron didn't break into the MIT network. He had both
legal and moral access to use it, and he did that like many other community
members. People plug things into MIT network jacks all the time. I did that
too. I never hid that I did that, and no one thought I was breaking, stealing,
or doing anything else wrong. I saw others do likewise. It's how the place
worked at the time.

He did bypass protections on JSTOR's systems. If someone had grounds to press
charges, it was JSTOR, not MIT.

> Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore
> everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions.
> "Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the
> laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it,
> since if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be
> changed.

That's a very culturally narrow point of view. It places you as being mostly
likely of either of Western European descent or Japanese, but there are a few
more cultures which define morality in terms of following the law. I think
this is the point at which you check out from the conversation -- most
monocultural people get very uncomfortable with foreign things, but:

That worldview completely breaks down when Hitler makes it a crime to kill
Jews, you have BLM protests in the US, or democracy protests in Honk Kong. It
breaks down in more subtle ways across the board.

And yes, people did push for change. Aaron's Law was almost passed, but
ultimately, it was blocked by Oracle. Oracle is a pretty evil corporation too,
although for the most part, it does a good job following the laws. That's your
queue to check out, I guess.

But the point is that the laws are at least as subjective and arbitrary as
people's cultural biases about what constitutes good and bad. If you want more
rational opinions of good versus evil, you can start with utilitarianism and
other philosophies of morality.

------
omershapira
This, alongside JSTOR's declaration of open access[1], shows that all major
players in the Aaron Swartz case had other choices.

RIP

[1] [https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/](https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-
free/)

------
jupp0r
While this is really good news, it's still mind boggling to me why giving
taxpayers free access to the research they paid for is still a controversial
thing at all in 2020. Not to mention the benefit to science of giving
everybody free access to everything.

------
czzr
When thinking about the cost of providing the services journals provide, I’m
always struck by the example of PloS - non-profit, set up with the mission of
promoting open access, and just about surviving by charging authors
$2000-$3000 per article.

I can only conclude that managing journals is not as cost free as most people
in this thread seem to think, for whatever reason.

~~~
dfdz
You should not be getting down voted.

I am an early career academic; there are some new non-profit open access
journals that I would consider publishing in that cost ~$500 dollars to
publish a paper. Everything is on arXix so I cannot justify the expense
(perhaps if I was late in my career with lots of grant money I would help to
support these journals..)

~~~
czzr
That’s interesting. I always thought that it was early career researchers who
had to publish in journals to establish their reputations. Does it not work
that way for you?

~~~
s0rce
In some fields you can probably just put up preprints if they are important
enough and get noticed, otherwise I assume the OP meant they are publishing in
for profit not open access journals that cost less for the author (via
charging everyone else).

------
pwillia7
Maybe Aaron will get to see his dream come true posthumously -- I sure hope
so.

------
mdoshi
This is great news! Going from prosecuting Swartz to ending a contract with
Elsevier.

------
birktj
Recently (I believe around a year ago or so) my university lost access to many
publisher services because of some negotiations. The negotiations were about a
new Norwegian law requiring all publicly funded research to be publicly
available. I don't remember exactly what happened with the negotiations, but I
presume they somehow found a solution.

EDIT: Found a relevant website about open access in Norway
[https://www.openaccess.no/english/](https://www.openaccess.no/english/)

~~~
Nemo_bis
The Norwegian case and many others are listed in the SPARC cancellation
tracker: [https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-
trackin...](https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/)

------
h91wka
Great news. Elsevier is a parasite.

------
wpietri
It is a rare pleasure to see people taking their principles seriously: "...
the MIT Framework is grounded in the conviction that openly sharing research
and educational materials is key to the Institute’s mission of advancing
knowledge and bringing that knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest
challenges".

Take note, corporations: this is how you live a mission statement.

~~~
3mcd
You should check out
[https://www.knowledgefutures.org](https://www.knowledgefutures.org), a non-
profit founded by the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab to build open
authoring/publishing tools and a distributed knowledge platform.

------
kerkeslager
That's great. It's good to see MIT standing up for open access principles.

------
rvz
Finally. But several years late on the side of MIT in this case but at last
better late than never.

------
tams
Snapshot for those who get a blocked message:

[https://archive.is/jISGG](https://archive.is/jISGG)

~~~
samizdis
Thanks for that.

------
jroseman93
Publishing industry is ripe for disruption. Publicly funded research should be
publicly available. Any 'fees' charged by publishers should be proportional to
the value-add those publishers provide. They can't claim the 'review process'
is part of that monetary value-add when reviewers are almost never paid.

------
dannykwells
Woohoo! First UC now Elsevier! The arc of the moral universe is long, but ever
so often, it does indeed bend towards justice.

RIP A.S.

------
nomercy400
I'm curious (playing devil's advocate): Does this mean that MIT can now do
research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals?

And, if somebody from MIT does publish something under this framework, can
they claim copyright and disallow any use of the contents of the papers if so
convenient? Move away from patents and straight into copyright. We all know
how well the US copyright system works, right?

I mean, doesn't Elsevier guarantee that the paper will be 'free-from-
copyright' of the original institution/country, to any other research
institution part of their network. Like, share the knowledge to those
connected.

Do these moves away from Elsevier mean a more open-access, or a more-
copyrighted-access to papers? I see no commitment for MIT to relinquish
copyright, nor any commitment to make everything open access.

~~~
bonoboTP
> Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish
> this anywhere, not even journals?

They were never required. Scientists do research and share their results so
they can be improved and combined and provide insight. It started out with
private letters between scientists in the early days, then journals appeared
that would distribute the incoming letters to other interested parties. Over
time it became a formalized system with metrics, incentives, publish or perish
etc. But the original goal was to share and announce your results.

~~~
PeterisP
Pretty much every research grant that feeds university researchers (as opposed
to industry researchers) will require that the results of the research must be
published; often with some more specific criteria - e.g. a peer-reviewed
journal with an impact rating in the top quartile, not just on your webpage.

------
RNCTX
The state university I attended here in Texas has started publishing a list of
their subscriptions and the costs.

[https://library.unt.edu/collection-
management/transparency-l...](https://library.unt.edu/collection-
management/transparency-library-subscription-pricing/)

What's notable is the ones who have tried to put non-disclosure clauses in
their subscription contracts. In my opinion a state university should not be
allowed, legally, to enter into a contract which is not fully available for
public review.

------
xvilka
MIT has its own publisher initiative that suits modern science - online,
interactive, and open-source. PubPub[1][2] is closer to something like
Authorea[3] and Overleaf[4].

[1] [https://www.pubpub.org/](https://www.pubpub.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/pubpub](https://github.com/pubpub)

[3] [https://authorea.com/](https://authorea.com/)

[4] [https://www.overleaf.com/](https://www.overleaf.com/)

------
sfgweilr4f
Elsevier does what exactly? Publish articles? Can't the various education /
research organizations set up their own?

Other than existing horrible contracts, what exactly is stopping them?

------
DataWorker
Come a long way since Aaron Swartz. Let’s hope the reform continues.

------
bogomipz
>"MIT has long been a leader in open access. Adopted in 2009, the MIT Faculty
Open Access Policy was one of the first and most far-reaching initiatives of
its kind in the United States. Forty-seven percent of faculty journal articles
published since the adoption of the policy are freely available to the world.

Could someone comment on the figure of 47%? What are the reasons this wouldn't
be higher than this given that the policy has been in effect well over a
decade now?

------
OliverJones
Question: is there a consequence to MIT's library system? Do they lose access
to that publisher's journals for the patrons of their libraries? Or are their
subscriptions to the journals a separate business deal? How does this all
work?

------
heyblinkin
As a former employee of Elsevier, you really do love to see it.

------
auggierose
I don't know, does it matter at this point? All papers are available for free
now anyway thanks to a Russian based operation...

~~~
ghoshbishakh
Yes but not legally available for free for everyone.

------
StreamBright
The world is slowly becoming a better place.

------
snambi
Why can't techincal papers use something similar to github/git Pull-request
model?

~~~
dguest
Can you elaborate? Do you mean curating papers via pull request?

If that's your question, the answer is that there's absolutely nothing in the
way technologically: academics could easily form shoestring "journals" around
a github README files with links to arXiv.

As others have said, the real issue is historical: for better or worse the
currency of science is still peer-reviewed publications in prestigious
journals, and a lot of those journals are still owned by Elsevier.

Obviously this is starting to change, but old traditions die hard.

------
ghoshbishakh
This would make Aron Swartz proud

------
monadic2
Welp, apparently we aren’t shifting away from toxic publishing mechanisms any
time soon.

------
MrGunn
As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I
spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years
later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a
sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your
hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that
wasn't apparent before.

Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there are. Is
research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will posting preprints or
research blogging fix everything? Nope.

If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is
absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be
allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is
insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer,
aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over
the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this
to change quickly. That said, it is changing.

Information and analytical services that support researchers and clinicians is
the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for many years now, and these
businesses only get even more valuable as more and more content is available
openly.

At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end services that
scientific societies, funders, researchers, and their institutions need to
keep the system running so they can focus on their research.

What are these systems?

Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to support the
mission of the society - advocating on policy issues important to their
research community - through the society journal. Elsevier makes running the
journal financially sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers,
attracting and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics complaints,
and providing a cheap platform.

Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in alignment
with the funders mission, not just by conferring status, but with more
advanced ways of understand the broader impact of a work. Elsevier (including
me personally) has worked to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the
impact factor: [https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-
metrics...](https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-
metrics/elsevier-is-expanding-its-use-of-altmetrics)

Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase their work,
recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for tenure & decide who
should get it.

After spending years working on projects with these different groups, I
developed a much more nuanced understanding of how everything works & what the
levers of change actually are. Happy to discuss with anyone!

~~~
xpe
Thanks for your thoughtful and nuanced comment.

> If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is
> absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to
> be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that
> is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like
> cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on
> consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want
> a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.

First off, in reply to this part: "You don't want a system like this to change
quickly." ... I don't accept this as a first principle.

It is useful to think about how research and funding interrelates with
publishing and peer-review mechanisms. However, I would _not_ advocate a "go
slow" approach with regards to modernizing publishing, e.g. out of some
concern for the ability of research and funding aspects to "keep up".

Generally speaking, I advocate for finding leverage points in systems to drive
change. Right now, there is considerable leverage to apply to the big academic
publishers. So, now, we should push. The big publishers will respond; there
will be friction and academic and political fighting. If we're successful,
there will be change.

I don't worry much about how such changes will hurt the research and funding
system. The system will adapt.

I am mindful that people have jobs in these industries, and that change may
threaten them. But it would be a fallacy to only blame promoters of change for
risking the status-quo jobs. I think a big responsibility falls on the
companies, too. They are (presumably) intelligent actors. So what is stopping
the companies from reforming themselves internally? Doing so could provide
continuity to their employees, preserving tacit knowledge.

When a company can fight change with PR and lobbying more affordably than
adapting, I am rarely surprised at what happens.

~~~
MrGunn
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree publishers could do more to change &
I especially think we should do more to make all the changes that are
happening under the hood more visible. I mean, that's literally my job. You
gave me a sincere response & deserve one in return, but we need to work
towards a shared understanding of what the current situation is if we want to
have a conversation that's not just talking past one another.

My understanding of the situation includes the following: Elsevier has a new
CEO. Elsevier has been reporting for several years now that revenue from
services has been one of the fastest growing parts of the business, so much so
that the company now calls itself an information and analytics company, not a
publisher (1). Elsevier, though slow initially, is now fully behind open
access. 9/10 of the journals launched last year were open access (2). Elsevier
is pursuing a number of what the industry calls "transformative agreements"
with libraries, consortia, and whole countries which involve full access to
all Elsevier content and built in open access publishing for everyone covered
under the arrangement (2). This specific issue was about one way of
structuring such an agreement to reduce the financial burden on MIT while
still ensuring all their content was published open access and was even
designed to make it easier for librarians to keep a collection of the
intellectual output of their institution by automatically pushing manuscripts
into the institutional repository, which is something librarians have been
asking for for a long time (3).

So given all this, the only way I can answer your question about what's
stopping change is to say that nothing is stopping it. It's happening & has
been happening for years. I am tempted to ask, looking at some of the comments
in the parent thread, what's stopping change in people's perceptions of
Elsevier? I don't just mean that rhetorically. I really would be interested in
understanding why people have the views they do and how they're different.

What's your current understanding of the situation and does it differ in ways
from mine that you'd like to highlight?

1\. [https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-
transcripts/2020/02/13/re...](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-
transcripts/2020/02/13/relx-plc-relx-q4-2019-earnings-call-transcript.aspx)
2\. [https://www.elsevier.com/about/elsevier-and-open-
access](https://www.elsevier.com/about/elsevier-and-open-access) 3\.
[https://www.elsevier.com/connect/learn-more-about-
elseviers-...](https://www.elsevier.com/connect/learn-more-about-elseviers-
negotiations-with-mit)

~~~
xpe
I appreciate your comment. I don't have much time at the moment to reply, but
I'll say this:

First, I would encourage you to seek out this kind of feedback broadly and
systematically (as you probably already are).

Second, perceptions change slowly.

Third, with regards to viewing established players with skepticism, savvy
people follow the money. Can you break down the financials of Elsevier and its
parent company, the RELX Group? How much of these profits come from closed-
access journals versus some of the newer initiatives?

Fourth, though it is less common, some organizations do put effort into long-
term initiatives that may cannibalize their cash cows. Let's talk about what
history has to tell us about those companies and those transitions.

------
GrumpyNl
Its about time, its just a cash machine.

------
oli5679
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it
for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published
over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and
locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers
featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send
enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but
instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow
anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only
apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have
been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the
work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the
folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s
outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights,
they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly
legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we
can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you
have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge
while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally,
you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it
with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling
download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have
been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the
information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called
stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral
equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t
immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they
operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the
exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light
and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to
this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it
to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We
need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.
We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message
opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.
Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy

------
djohnston
Excellent

------
q3k

        You don't have permission to access "http://news.mit.edu/2020/guided-by-open-access-principles-mit-ends-elsevier-negotiations-0611" on this server.
        Reference #18.9d580317.1591886472.57240f92

~~~
ghaff
The site is just being hugged a bit too hard.

