UCSF Scientists Defy Elsevier’s Embargo

Elsevier, the publishing giant, has erected a wall of steep subscription fees that lines corporate and shareholder pockets while exploiting academic altruism and promotion structures. The situation has forced researchers to turn to innovative, and potentially risky sources for information.

February 25, 2020 marks the 230th day that UC researchers will face a paywall when trying to access articles published after 2018 in journals run by Elsevier.

UC lost this access via the ScienceDirect platform in July 2019 when Elsevier finally revoked UC’s access to new content in approximately 2,500 journals formerly subscribed by the UC system (subscribed content published before 2019 remains accessible on ScienceDirect per contract).

Elsevier had been granting ongoing access to new content despite expiration of the previous contract on January 1, 2019 and the ending of formal negotiations on February 28, 2019.

In those negotiations, a novel team of UC representatives, including UCSF’s Richard Schneider, proposed a restructuring of the agreement between the publisher and UC to guarantee open access for UC generated research publications and a containment of payment increases.

Their proposal aligned with the university’s mission as a public institution and with the faculty’s Declaration of Rights and Principles to make open access the default for UC research.

Elsevier found these terms unacceptable and, holding the line, the UC delegation walked away from a deal.

The last year has seen no resumption of formal talks, and a souring of relations as evidenced by a faculty boycott of Elsevier led by UCSF Professors Peter Walter and Dyche Mullins.

This is not the first time that contract negotiations have broken down between UC and Elsevier, nor is UC the only university to have such problems.

However, these recent impasses possibly mark a changing tide as the open access movement and the instability of Elsevier’s economic model have come into confluence.

Chris Shaffer, UCSF University Librarian and Assistant Vice Chancellor, points out that the university has long held that journal articles should be broadly accessible.

“The UC system has been a leader in the open access movement,” Shaffer said. “The consensus today is that work funded by public dollars at institutions sponsored by state budgets is a public good, and should be accessible to the public.”

Further, Mullins likened the work to a public good.

“Scientific publishing is essential to the academic enterprise and functions as a utility,” Mullins said. “However, unlike the regulated PG&E, publishers have used their monopolistic position to extort library budgets that are obligated to pay their fees.”

Walter noted that prominent biological journals provide singular material.

“The situation is further complicated in that every scientific journal and article are unique commodities,” he said. “Normal market forces are not in play, because there is no exact replacement for Cell.”

Up to this point, publishers have leveraged this situation much to their benefit with towering profit margins between 30-40%.

However, their steep subscription fees have severely limited access to others.

Pivotal in this turmoil is assessing the actual impact the embargo has had on UCSF researchers.

Both UC and Elsevier have been conducting their own surveys, but they are still ongoing with no preliminary data released to date (a poll run by the Academic Senate and Libraries can be found in a banner on the Library website: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/).

In the absence of these data, I conducted a smaller scale survey to preliminarily probe this question beyond the occasional reference or joke at a journal club.

My survey obtained 44 responses with the following roles at UCSF: 38% students, 30% post-docs, 20% faculty, and the rest composed of technicians and staff.

In aggregate, it is clear that UCSF researchers are hitting the paywall very often, with 65.9% of respondents reporting a desire to access a blocked article at least once a week.

However, this frequent headache does not necessarily translate into major impacts on their research with an average impact score of 2.52 out of 5 (5 being a severely limiting impact) reported.

This disconnect likely reflects the changing landscape in the way information is accessed in the digital age.

When asked how they access embargoed articles, only 27.9% responded that they give up, and of those only one response indicated this was the only outcome they experience.

Overall, the respondents indicate a rich number of resources to access articles from pre-prints to inter-library loans to directly communicating with the corresponding author.

However, the elephant in the room is the use of illicit websites, such as Sci-Hub, which nearly half (48.8%) of the respondents indicated using.

However Anneliese Taylor, UCSF Head of Scholarly Communication, discouraged the use of such websites.

“The Library does not endorse the use of illegal sites such as Sci-Hub,” she said. “Instead, we recommend that researchers look for legal open versions of articles through tools like Unpaywall and Open Access Button. The Library can also provide copies of articles at no cost through interlibrary loan (ILL), and we’ll reimburse you if you run into a situation where you cannot wait for ILL and have to pay to download an article from the publisher. ”

(See all alternative access options.)

Further, sites like Sci-Hub can expose researchers to digital risk. Sci-Hub’s founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, is currently under investigation by the DOJ for working with Russia intelligence agencies.

Often articles hosted on that site end up there via the theft of academics’ credentials.

Nonetheless, the heightened use of the site here at UCSF and its widespread global use highlight that the internet can disrupt the industry of science just as it has music and print journalism before it.

With this increased technological capacity it is now up to the current crop of researchers to decide what the future of scientific publishing can and will look like. Increasingly biology is becoming an open science.

“Biologists don’t work on common data sets like physicists,” Shaffer said, “so preprint servers haven’t played the same role in biology as they have in that discipline.”

However, sites like bioRxiv and medRxiv are gaining in popularity and could change the scientific landscape.

For instance, rapidly available preprints facilitated global study of the recent novel coronavirus.

“Our lab has gotten fantastic feedback from other universities doing preprint journal clubs,” Mullins said. “This type of interaction is great for doing robust research with input from scientists of all stages of training.”

The innovation of the communication landscape does not have to stop there: the UC itself is experimenting with journals run from the academy such as the eScholarship publishing platform, entirely removing the commercial third party.

And innovations like JMIRx which provide peer review and copyediting services for preprints have the potential to disrupt the traditional publishing model.

However, “critical peer review must remain part of our process, and we must change how we evaluate impact and quality of our science,” Walter said. “Never ending revisions to articles posted as works in progress can lead to confusion.

“Also, journal editors can be easily swayed by a hot topic lacking in robust experimental underpinnings.”

It is tempting to ask in all this, whether in all of this there will be scientific Spotify or Netflix to fundamentally change the model?

However, for the near future that doesn’t seem to be any stakeholder’s wish.

Respondents to my survey stated goals very much in line with the library’s.

Essentially, the desire is to move to an open publishing model instead of a closed access system, with potentially innovative payment models to keep the opportunities open to groups and institutions without the resources UCSF has.

Inextricable from these goals would be loss of revenue for Elsevier. However unlikely compromise seems at this time, there is hope.

There are no formal negotiations explicitly planned, but there is an informal upcoming workshop where both sides can break bread and see what value can be gained by working together.

Elsevier has named a new CEO, Kumsal Bayazit, who, accounts claim, felt like Darth Vader given academia’s cold reception of her.

Mullins tried to soften the characterization of Bayazit’s promotion.

“It wasn’t that we have anything personal against her, but we feel as if she has been given the Death Star,” he said.

If these allusions have any predictive power for the scientific publishing industry, the coming year could be an explosive one, as all the stories told so far involving Darth Vader and the Death Star have met fiery ends.