MIT reports that it has cut spending by 80% (about 300 million yen) by terminating its contract with academic publisher Elsevier
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) terminated its contract with Elsevier, a publisher of academic journals, in 2020 and stopped subscribing to Elsevier's academic journals to read academic papers. MIT has revealed that this has enabled it to save $2 million (about 290 million yen), equivalent to 80% of the annual subscription costs.
Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries - SPARC
MIT has established the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, a framework for making academic papers openly available, based on the idea that published academic papers can be made freely accessible to anyone in the world without restrictions, in order to realize their true value. Chris Berg, director of the MIT Libraries, who was involved in the formulation of the MIT 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 inconsistent with MIT's history of supporting open education and research.'
MIT has had a long-standing contract with Elsevier, a publisher of academic journals, but in 2020 it asked Elsevier to enter into a new contract in line with the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. However, Elsevier was unable to make 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
As of 2019, before the contract with Elsevier was terminated, MIT had individual subscriptions to approximately 675 academic journals published by Elsevier. However, when the contract ended, all of these subscriptions were canceled. MIT estimates that this has allowed it to save more than 80% of its expenditures on article subscriptions.
Even before the introduction of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, MIT had been thinking about how to access academic articles if the contract with Elsevier ended. To understand the scope of support required, we used Unsub , a subscription journal analysis tool for libraries, to determine the percentage of academic articles used by MIT faculty that were already publicly available. This revealed that many of the academic journals to which MIT has permanent access rights were covered.
These events prompted MIT to terminate its contract with Elsevier. Since then, MIT has been working with faculty and university administrators to build alternative ways to access the research they need without subscribing to Elsevier. The transition from Elsevier to alternatives has been relatively smooth, with minimal resistance from researchers. Most MIT faculty support the framework known as the 'MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts,' and four years after the contract with Elsevier ended, they seem to have become accustomed to 'accessing academic papers without Elsevier.'
At the time of writing, the biggest drawback of not subscribing to Elsevier is the lack of immediate access to papers. Nevertheless, MIT has partnered with the paper delivery service Reprints Desk to ensure that there is a way to subscribe to papers individually. As a result, 92% of all papers at MIT are accessible within one minute, and 97% within one hour.
'Many universities are hesitant to offer access on a per-article basis, out of concern that the high frequency of individual article subscriptions could result in costs that exceed the standard Big Deal,' Berg said. But MIT's experience shows that this is not the case.
Through these experiences, MIT argues that 'it became clear that there was a significant discrepancy between what MIT was paying to subscribe to Elsevier journals and what it actually cost researchers to access the academic articles they needed. MIT argues that other universities could similarly significantly reduce their expenditures for accessing academic articles, and that 'using the savings to co-invest in open publishing should provide more free access to academic articles.'
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