The NYT keeps changing what "first" this is throughout the article and poses it as a race against Hollywood. First on the ISS. First on space station. First in orbit. Only the first of these is true. The Soviets released the film Return from Orbit in 1984, which featured scenes filmed onboard the Salyut 7 space station and a Soyuz vessel. So unless you want to start adding more caveats, the Russians in fact won this race several decades ago.

Definitely agree with this. Some of the same people served on the report committee for Aaron Shwatz's death and on the OA Task Force. This probably contributed to trying to making a real change for the better here.

I really do suggest you read Peter Suber's book, because it addresses many of these complaint. Keep in mind that Nature's costs are an outlier and Nature is one of the most intransigent players when it comes to OA.

Regarding rights, moving towards OA actually protects certain rights. Traditionally, publishers required that you assigned copyright of your work to them. This meant that you couldn't substantively reuse your own articles in, say, your dissertation. One of the plank's of MIT's framework is that "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." This of course is only copyright. Open access says nothing about patents or profiting from your research. While it is certainly true that university's have an issue of properly attributing such rights to students, it is a separate issue from OA. We are already publishing articles. It's part of the academic game. OA is just about making sure that it's not jut those with lots of money who can read them. The patents and tech are still all yours (or your PI's or universities or whatever).

Regarding costs of publishing, there are two main issues. One is that the prices that commercial publishers in particular charge is way out of line with their costs. As paper journals have gone away, prices of online only journals have soared (and resultant profits, way outpacing inflation. Elsevier's profit margin is ~40%. I don't know if you are familiar with other industries, but that is *very* high. Beyond that though, there are a variety of OA models that do work for covering costs and whatnot. You yourself cited PNAS, which makes it work. Preprint services like arXiv also make it work (though without peer review, obviously). Your cited op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education is mostly focusing on smaller professional societies which I already pointed out as a legitimate critique earlier in this thread and suggested potential alternatives. All of this is say that it can work.

Regarding why we we haven't moved already, that's a combination of factors. One is that academia, despite its political leanings, is a very conservative institution that is slow to change. Another is where the economic incentives are aligned. If professors had to pay journal subscription fees out of their own funding pools, you can be sure that they would be howling for OA or at least dramatically reduced costs. But they don't pay themselves. It's the university library that negotiates contracts and pays for it out of the general budget. And whenever you have someone other than the user paying for the product, incentives get misaligned and costs can grow.

A final reason is the FUD spread by publisher and outright bribes. If you haven't read Richard Feynman's essay about his experiences with the textbook industry, I really recommend it. I can confirm that academic publishers do much of the same thing in terms of offering free swag, free trips to Hawaii, etc., to the editors of notable journals. You don't have to convince the whole field to stay put if you can convince the editors, after all. The publishers like to talk about the end of peer review and all the is good and holy about academic publishing. But peer review works with OA, it has been doing so for quite some time. After all, peer reviewers and editors aren't paid under the current system. Journals can transition or be replaced gradually over time. Or we could set up a flag system on a place like arXiv to indicate what things have been peer reviewed by what organization. There are plenty of models.

We aren't talking pie-in-the-sky here. most of Europe is well on the way to doing this./a>

You can always point out to them that, at least for sexual harassment, more and more universities are voluntarily doing climate surveys: https://www.aau.edu/key-issues...

And some states are considering legislation to require such surveys: https://malegislature.gov/Bill...

Pretty much all the big players recognize that APCs aren't the future. Don't get me wrong, Elsevier is going to milk both subscriptions and APCs for as long as they can, but even they aren't betting on that in the long term. That's why they have been buying up research and education infrastructure/assistance like Mendeley and 3D4Medical (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/elsevier#section-lists-featuring-this-company).

Whether we like it or not, Elsevier is likely to continue to exist, just in a different (and hopefully less exploitative) form.

The OA Task Force heard this sentiment several times for our chemistry brethren. Despite this, ACS has actually proven thus far to be relatively willing to work with us (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2020/march/acs-signs-innovative-north-american-open-access-agreement-with-mit.html).

Maybe they just have less market power than Elsevier to stand on. Also helps that MIT is no bit player themselves.

Yes and no. MIT actually did invent its own publishing system that it continues to support and use for all sorts of things (https://www.pubpub.org/). The OA Task Force used it for publishing our white papers and reports (eg. https://mitoataskforce.pubpub....) and even getting feedback on the drafts. Obviously getting something to catch on at scale is difficult and we didn't want to put all of our eggs the basket of rolling our own "new universal standard" (https://xkcd.com/927/).

If I had to bet, I think that the "publishing platform of the future" is already here. It's called arXiv (and all the other pre-print servers out there). Over time, I expect we will get a more reliable funding system down for them and we will start to build added functionality on top of them. The various professional orgs and communities that currently run peer review will still do that, but it will show up as "Peer Reviewed by X" flags on the preprint platform, rather than on some completely separate journal (though separate websites will likely continue to exist to make scanning through just that one org's papers easier). But maybe I'm wrong and we will end up with something else.

Forgot to reply to your question about pros and cons. Since Slashdot doesn't allow for editing of comments (didn't expect to run into that oft-complained about issue *this* quickly), here is a separate comment.

My best recommendation is Peter Suber's book titled Open Access. It is available open access itself, aptly enough, at the MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access, scroll down a bit and on the left here are download links in various formats) (Peter Suber is not himself from MIT, for clarity. Obviously this book is not some completely neutral, disinterested party, but I do think that Peter Suber does a pretty fair job of laying out the counterarguments to open access (though of course he also has responses to them). Obviously the state of the world has changed a decent amount (though not as much as I would have liked) since the book was published in 2012, but most of the arguments for and against are pretty much the same.

This a batch of issues that I certainly care a great deal about and have been working over the past ~2 years to address (completely separately from the OA Task Force). I would point you towards FAARM (https://www.cmu.edu/stugov/gsa/Blog/faarm.html), which is an effort involving the graduate student governments from several schools, including MIT and CMU, to advocate for the federal research funding agencies to require more on this front (since it is hard to get the schools to do it themselves one by one). The first step is just data. Get schools to start publicly reporting some of the statistics you are talking about so potential students can make informed decisions and current students can identify problems.

Another component is to start having research proposals (fellowship applications in particular) include some description of what mentorship activities the advisor intends to conduct. These don't need to be considered as part of the proposal acceptance-denial decision yet, but they will enable the funding agency to start to build up a database of what professors say that they are doing. Couple this with random surveys of grad students and you can find out what they are *actually* doing. You can then compare this with the graduation and employment placement rates and start to figure out what works and what doesn't in terms of advising and mentorship, and start developing best practices.

Regarding disputes and conflicts, several departments at MIT have having active conversations to try to reform some of that, build up whistleblower mechanisms and whatnot. The whole Epstein thing sort of kickstarted that and the current George Floyd travesty has kept up the momentum (manifested as #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM). Maybe we will get some real productive change, but who knows?

I certainly shared your disappointment that there wasn't such a cascade (as of yet at least). UC's declaration was certainly a big jolt of encouragement for us. It also helped shake loose some of the more reluctant parties to take a firm stand.

One major issue that we have in the US is that (according to our general counsel at least), universities can't do too much in the way of directly collaborating on an Elsevier boycott, because that would be considered a price-setting cartel. Europe hasn't had this problem since most of them negotiate their journal subscriptions through a government agency. For better or worse, you can't sue a government agency under antitrust laws.

The honest answer is compromise. It is an unfortunate fact that not every field is as progressive when it come to open access as machine learning (computer science in general, really) or physics or mathematics. It is definitely true that many members of the task force (myself included) felt strongly that we don't want to move from the current closed access model (where anyone can submit articles but only the rich can read them) to an APC model (where anyone can read articles but only the rich can submit them). I am hopeful that we can keep moving in a direction that avoids both of these, or at bare minimum avoids the >$1K APCs that some journals *cough* nature *cough*

An example of a legitimate concern that some fields have, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, is that the professional societies use a paid journal (either subscription or APC) in order to finance their primary annual conference, since they have a lot less government and industrial research funding. My preference is that universities would just provide some amount of subsidies to these conferences directly rather than going through the journals in this way, but it is certainly true that it is harder to figure out exactly who should pay how much.

It's all profit, baby. They got a profit margin of almost 40% (https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/elsevier-fact-sheet/). That's what you can get when volunteers do almost all of your work.

Been a lurker for many years but since I am one of the people who served on the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research, I thought I would finally make an account and comment. If people have questions about what went into this, what our thought process was, what the goal is, I'm happy to do what I can to answer.

In general, though, I would like to state that this has been a long time coming. MIT has been working towards this for 4+ years, figuring out exactly what compromises were acceptable, what we want the future to look like with regards to OA, and building support among community (the faculty in particular, students and staff were largely on board from the get-go). Academia still has a long ways to go IMHO, but this yet another step in the right direction (Europe's Plan S and University of California's rejection of Elsevier's terms were two other big steps.) The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is also working towards moving us forward from the research funding side of things too.