MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

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.

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

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

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 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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry?

Or perhaps lower quality.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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....

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.

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.

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 did? Is there any alternative nowadays?

Courts are influenced by academic scholarship.

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

Academia's Ticketmaster

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.