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".

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:

So many monopolies do this and they should all be disrupted. This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally. Google with Chrome, Apple with iPhone.

> Societal change can be so very slow, nonmonotonic, and profoundly discouraging. And yet here we are, making progress.

Encouraging, but we lost Aaron.

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.

If you find yourself in a famine with a warehouse of food, and your thought is "how can I exploit this situation for maximum profit" you are doing it wrong.

Its the same behavior you seen in frustrated adolescents that feel to small to retaliate against the perpetrators of their misfortune and "start small" by torturing smaller animals...

the system greatly benefits those it pretends to protect the authors against.

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.

Unless you're in academia, you'd have no idea. I spent a few years in academia while pursuing my Masters. Dropped out for various reasons and never had any idea this was such a huge thing - mainly because as a university student, you just always had access.

I got a small glimpse when I got a job a few years later working for a rather large legal publisher and how locked down they kept all of their online materials for anybody outside of academics. Its when I really understood there was a massive war raging about access to this stuff and the publishers trying to eek out every penny from granting access to materials and research that should have been just in the public domain. I didn't stay there long and had almost forgotten about all that stuff until 2011 when it broke into the news cycle again.

You're 100% right, this should really be a much larger issue and covered more regularly, it has massive implications on research and copyrights. Remember how long the issues of Napster and piracy have been in the media for so long (there was just another HN topic this week), but this? Not much is ever really talked about it - it just seems to linger in the shadows, which is depressing.

It's just not an issue for most people's everyday. So it's just not an issue.

Being cut off from library access was a huge shock for me on leaving uni.

It's literally a non-issue for, I would bet, a majority of people. It just doesn't exist in their day to day. Regardless of how that actually impacts the world.

Even if you made it super easy and public access, I doubt 50% or more of the population would know or care.

Sure, but if you look at any of the fairly ridiculous and designed-to-be-divisive issues that pretty much decide every bit of our political conversation.. anything can be an issue. Making the military more diverse is a good example, because while it's absolutely important, it also affects less than 1% of people directly, and less than 3% indirectly. I'd hazard a guess that open-access to research affects more than 1% of people directly, and roughly 100% of people indirectly.

> state funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void

This phrasing from GP works great because it pushes people's "freedom" buttons, and also their "curb government corruption" buttons, and for the more academically inclined, appeals to everything from accelerationist futurism to enlightened humanism. And it's not even divisive! This isn't controversial at all for anyone except the rent-seeking journal owners, and it seems like an easy win for anyone who wants to champion it. All by itself, this would be an amazing legacy, even for someone who exits political life immediately afterwards.

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, but I guess also the open access efforts haven't had any obvious positive effects notable to you?

Unfortunately, the impact seems to have been limited, primarily because the US didn't sign up to it.

So I'm afraid I don't see California being able to go on its own.

I don't think this second part you suggest is something the state can just unilaterally do if there's an existing valid contract and the other party doesn't agree. You could mandate that no contracts may be renewed and all contracts should be terminated as soon as the terms permit.

If the state does not enforce a contract through the courts, what is it really worth?

That's already a requirement for a huge amount of research.

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.

Break the an oligopoly by making them irrelevant. Academia cannot continue to feed these monsters with free resources and then also try to contain them.

If a user doesn't want it, they can format the drive, or filter by subject, and get any missing articles for a subject domain from friends/whomever, but preferably first share articles with interested peers before overwriting them.

This will make the hoi polloi understand the problem, and prevent them from forgetting the lesson.

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>

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 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.

This is an incredibly important and powerful strategy, as a customer or a vendor. When everything is negotiable, trouble follows. The instant gratification of a "win" doesn't help move an organization forward. Having and sticking to principles does, with practical benefits. Trust grows and culture improves. Consistency (in contracts, features, information, behavior) builds.

Portraying it as a principle, a policy ('our policy is ...'), an emotional issue, etc. are all just window dressings for what they want, and everyone tries to portray their wants to be as non-negotiable as possible in order to drive up the price they can demand. One basic tactic is to act angry about your want; some politicians love to do this one - it's a new outrage every day.

Well I also can act angry and say something or anything is non-negotiable, but the only question is, how much am I willing to give up in order to get that result. Acting angry, saying 'it's our policy' - I don't care about your internal policies; they aren't laws and you can change them at any time; they are your choices just like any other in a negotiation.

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.

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.

This is not a modern-capitalism take, maybe just a modern-capitalism phrasing. If you read "money" as common unit of value (which it is), not just dollars in hand specifically, then the statement is effectively true for 99%+ of people; the few for which it doesn't hold are considered insane[0], and we try to fix them or lock away in institutions, for the safety of everyone else[1].

There's no absolute value you won't compromise if the cost of keeping it is high enough, or equivalently, the benefit of breaking it is high enough. Having principles, integrity, is a way to boost the cost of some behaviors ahead of time, so you won't be tempted to engage in them even if presented with substantial rewards. It's particularly effective if other people know your stated principles and will hold you accountable. But it's still a finite threshold that can be overcome (especially with of companies, where principles generally are just pure marketing).

A skilled negotiator understands that everyone will sell out on their principles if the reward is big enough - but they also understand that it cuts both ways. Negotiation is a dance of allocating costs and benefits so that everyone actually gets something out of it[2]. It makes little sense otherwise.

--

[0] - Absolute principles are like probabilities 0 and 1 in probability theory - they break the math. Or zero in general whenever you want to do multiplication or division. You don't want absolute principles, or anything you do will be defined purely by them.

[1] - And/or stuck in cults as followers; notably cult leaders tend to be very much pragmatic and money-oriented.

[2] - Relative to the non-negotiated/fought outcome. "Your money or your life" sucks for the mugging victim either way, but the victim prefers being alive to being dead and the mugger prefers theft to theft + murder, so a negotiation is still worthwhile for both.

Negotiations always come down to strength of need and best alternatives.

It seems Elsevier overplayed their hand. They could have given in, but then everyone would demand the same.

They probably assume it'll take other unis years to be able to get rid of them, so it's better to keep milking them for now. Once enough leave, they'll change their tunes though (by which time it may be too late).

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.

MIT is one the the preeminent universities in the world, perhaps the preeminent one.

The difference in approach, outcome and size of expenditure between MIT and the University of California System in their negotiations with Elsevier interests university libraries everywhere when considering their own publications strategies. It is great that both institutions have been open about their budgets, their negotiation stance, and the outcome.

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.

Copy-editors are expensive, and paid for by the researchers, not the journals.

My spouse is an editor at an academic journal in her field and does some of both. In papers selected for publication, she does exert editorial input. In terms of remuneration, it is a compensated position; but how the money flows between the academic society, the journal and Elsevier, that part is lost on me.

The reality is that the power asymmetry is the opposite.

What are these large costs for playing what game? Again, this isn't formally controlled by the publishers at all. The snobbery you imagine comes from the promotion and hiring committees and Elsevier and the other publishers aren't on those committees.

And you might ask why do the promotion and tenure committees act with such imagined snobbery? They're all experienced academics. It's not like the schools are putting some randos on these committees. It's easily possible for some of these committees to have 300 collective years of experience in the field. And so if they're valuing some Elsevier journals more than a rando PDF FTP site, well, I think we've got to respect their opinion. Or are you saying they're just puppets and fools of Elsevier?

That's not how academia works, though. It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.

And they don't need to work with any formal publisher at all. Open source technology and the Internet makes it very easy for anyone to distribute their own work for free. And many do.

But for some reason people still want to pay the page fees. I think this is a signal that most academics are getting something for their money.

Any grad student--who does the grunt work in academia--will tell you they would not be allowed to put up their research online without their lab's permission. And grad students sign a form that anything they say and write is owned as IP by university anyways.

Please look into how the academic sausage is made before spouting more misinformation as well as specious takes on spherical-cow free market theories. Your comments are all over this thread and I can't mentally unread them.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

> In 2022, Elsevier approached MIT with a request to re-engage in contract discussions. This time, Bourg was joined by an MIT contracts attorney in the negotiation, and once again, the Libraries’ asks were based on the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. MIT requested an outlining of the goods and services they would be paying for, some means of using the MIT contract to advance equity in the scholarly communications system, and a contract that allowed all MIT authors (including non-corresponding authors) to have their articles openly available in a repository without an embargo. However, the company returned to MIT with its standard read and publish contract proposal, and MIT once again decided to remain out of contract.

This is such a glorious example of disenshittify or die [0]. Elsevier keeps pretending it has the upper hand to force itself on institutions, but the less institutions play their game, the more obvious it becomes that nothing of value was lost.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-abou...

“Look at data about use, costs, and find allies across your campus who care about issues of equity and openness,” Bourg said. “This is both the right thing to do in terms of our values with public engagement and the right thing to do from an economic point of view.” - Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries at MIT.

The article states that MIT pays $300,000 annually for individual request fees, far less than the prior contract amount.

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....

Any individual publisher which restricted access via these brokers would face a sudden loss of revenue and a knock on effect to the prestige of their journals. If they allowed some customers to use these services but not others, the predatory nature of the model would stick out a mile to institutes and regulators.

Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.

System is broken, do not get me wrong. But just a homepage is not the solution

Everyone can publish anything, but the journals can lend credibility, which is all they do anyway.

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 inertia and rent seeking behavior.

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.

You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. It could become very prestigious for researchers to be mentioned in your newsletter, and your own reputation will hinge on the quality of the papers you link to (and the ones you leave out). Even so, this service still doesn't require that you host or own copyright to those works!

Nor does this arrangement require that any one work be found on only one single curator's shortlist and no others.

That's something worth signing up for.

Firstly, it can be by providing a good service. Before the war, most papers were published by learned societies and such societies tended to not be very good publishers – they would be slow with long backlogs and unable to publish the volume of papers scientists wanted published at the time. By providing a faster service they could get papers.

Second it can be by offering a service at all. If you have a Springer journal and an Elsevier journal for some field, they can both get papers because researchers need to publish to advance their careers and one journal will not be big enough for all the papers in that field

Third can be from being a preferred choice by being prestigious, which can matter even without impact factor arithmetic – hiring committees made of peers can still know which journals in the field are more prestigious / harder to be published in, and take that into account when hiring. It’s not totally clear to me how to become prestigious. One way is by inertia – if you were prestigious before you probably still are. Something some publishers (Pergamon Press, but maybe others too?) did was owning and dining prominent scientists to get them to sign exclusive contracts to edit new journals. Perhaps this association via the editorial board could improve the journal’s prestige or otherwise get desirable papers in.

It does seem true to me that scientific publishers used to provide a pretty valuable service, and I think if one were in a government looking at all the government money going to the journals via universities, one might be able to feel that the improvement to the rate of scientific exchange was worth it.

It feels that today, a lot of that value comes from various kinds of inertia/lock-in: Elsevier has the papers and scientists must publish in Elsevier journals to advance their careers, which maintains the prestige of those journals and means the publisher continues to have the papers.

The current model for traditional publishing vets each paper that is published; arxive vets each author[1] once, and then their papers can be published.

So, sure, you could be reading the ramblings of a random person, but it is quite unlikely.

I think what is more valuable is looking at the citations to the work you are reading; unless you are reading something very very new, if it is valuable at all it would be cited.

[1] When I last looked at publishing (maybe a decade ago?), arxive was vetting authors, not individual papers.

With the shift to online, the barrier to entry is much lower.

There is still a role as a curator, with the an ability to garner attention ( and because the publishing barrier is lower, this has become more important ) - in a similar way to a radio DJ, but unlike music there is no need for a monetarisation platform from an authors perspective.

There's a Romanian saying "A furat dar a și facut": They stole but at least they did something (usually in reference to politicians I believe but still).

> 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.

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/

Ahja, companies interested in "tailored science to their business needs" might suspend their fund maybe?

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.