From the imitable Corey Doctorow, in a good, link-filled post on the scholarly publishing scam:
It’s been four years since MIT’s decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier
How are MIT’s academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher’s site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there’s interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT’s libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.
This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn’t much!
Doctorow overestimates the danger to Elsevier et al, especially since other big libraries—notably the UC system—capitulated. The MIT story may hint at a solution to the collective action problem, but until a trans-Atlantic coalition of prominent libraries follows suit, it’s just a noble experiment.