The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) terminated its contract with Elsevier, a publisher of scientific journals, in 2020 and canceled subscriptions to Elsevier’s scientific journals to read scientific papers. MIT announced that this enabled it to save $2 million (about 290 million yen), equivalent to 80% of the annual subscription cost.
Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries – SPARC
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MIT has the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, a framework for making academic works publicly available, based on the idea that published academic works should be made freely available to anyone in the world without restrictions to realize their true value. Chris Berg, Director of MIT Libraries, who helped formulate the MIT Framework, Framework for Publisher Contracts, said: “Hoarding the funds generated by the university and continuing to pay hundreds of millions of yen to companies is completely contrary to MIT’s tradition of supporting open education and research.”
MIT has a long-standing contract with Elsevier, a publisher of scientific journals, but in 2020 it asked Elsevier to enter into a new contract under the MIT Framework for Publishing Contracts. However, Elsevier was unable to provide a proposal that met its demands, and MIT terminated its contract with the company in June 2020.
MIT ends contract negotiations with publisher Elsevier due to lack of proposal for open use of research results – GIGAZINE
Until 2019, before terminating its contract with Elsevier, MIT had individual subscriptions to about 675 journals published by Elsevier. However, when the contract ended, all of these subscriptions were canceled. MIT estimates that this saved it more than 80% of its article subscription expenses.
Even before the MIT Framework for Publishing Agreements was introduced, MIT had been considering how to access scientific articles when the contract with Elsevier ended. To understand the level of support required, we Log out a subscription journal analysis tool for libraries to determine the percentage of scholarly articles used by MIT faculty that were already publicly available. It found that many of the scholarly journals to which MIT has perpetual access rights were covered.
These events led MIT to terminate its contract with Elsevier. Since then, MIT has been working with faculty and university administrations to alternative routes to access the research they need without subscribing to Elsevier. The transition from Elsevier to alternatives has been relatively smooth and with minimal resistance from researchers. Most MIT faculty support the framework known as the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts and, four years after the end of the contract with Elsevier, they seem to have become accustomed to “accessing academic papers without Elsevier.”
At the time of writing, the biggest disadvantage of not having a subscription to Elsevier is the lack of immediate access to the papers. Nevertheless, MIT has partnered with the paper delivery service. Reprint switch to ensure that there is a way to subscribe to individual articles. This makes 92% of all articles at MIT accessible within a minute and 97% within an hour.
“Many universities are reluctant to offer article-based access for fear that the high frequency of single article subscriptions could result in costs that exceed the standard. Large “Deal,” said Berg. But MIT’s experience shows that this is not the case.
Through these experiences, MIT says, it “became clear that there was a significant discrepancy between the price MIT paid to subscribe to Elsevier journals and the actual cost researchers had to pay to access the scientific articles they needed.” MIT argues that other universities could also significantly reduce their spending on access to scientific articles and that “using the savings to jointly invest in open publishing should enable freer access to scientific articles.”
