In March 2026, MIT’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) passed a Resolution on Scientific Publishing and MIT Libraries, a wide-ranging document that calls upon the MIT community, as well as federal funding agencies, to help remedy longstanding issues in scholarly publishing — from exorbitantly expensive open access charges for articles, to the monopoly of “hyper-prestige” journals, to promotion and tenure incentives that are “misaligned with scientific and academic ideals.”

Co-leading the effort was Shiwei Mitchell-Wang, a chemistry and brain and cognitive sciences graduate student who serves on the Presidential Advisory Cabinet, President Sally Kornbluth’s student advising body. Conversations with fellow students about MIT Libraries services in a time of budget cuts led Mitchell-Wang to bring these issues to the GSC, where he served as external affairs chair for two years. 

In fall 2025, Mitchell-Wang and GSC President Teddy Warner, also a chemistry grad student, invited Libraries staff to consult about publishing and related issues. GSC’s general council discussed, debated, and edited the resolution, and when it came to the floor for a vote in March, it passed nearly unanimously (31-1). 

In this interview, Mitchell-Wang and Warner, both of whom graduate this year, talk about what they hope will happen next. 

Q: The resolution emerged from conversations about MIT Libraries in a time of budget cuts, and grad students’ concerns about losing library services. How did it grow to what it is now?

Mitchell-Wang: The resolution touches upon long-existing frustrations among graduate students with the current publishing system. The student representatives on the general council broadly feel the impact of prestige journals on the research we do. What these journals created is a sense that you have to publish in one to get the attention you deserve, and if you don’t, it’s not considered good work.

The high-prestige journals have particular tastes and preferences, incentivizing researchers to mold their work to cater to them, which is not always the science that people want to do or the science that we should be doing. Students worry that, to some extent, this distorts graduate education, and in some cases prevents students from pursuing their own directions.

Q: As open access (OA) to scholarly papers has become more popular, many publishers now make a lot of money from it through expensive article processing charges (APCs) and publishing agreements with libraries. Have you encountered high APCs?


Warner: I think open access is a good idea, so that the general public, who is funding research by taxes, can see the research. But [paid OA] just shifts the costs to the people doing the research. We have a paper in review right now, and it’s being submitted under embargoed open access to make it cheaper, which is still $2,000.

Mitchell-Wang: We wrote about this in the resolution.
 [“GSC calls on the MIT Libraries to identify Open-Access, equitable, and sustainable journals in each academic discipline and encourage publications in these journals through publishing agreements.”] We’d like the Libraries to sign publishing agreements with journals that are reputable and affordable.

Q: But you still have to contend with the fact that you want to get published in journals that are high-impact and well known. How can you change the system while also working within it? 

Mitchell-Wang: It’s a collective action problem. Many people don’t like the system, but you have to participate in it for future jobs and attention.

I think it’s significant progress that people are now talking about the financial side of things. It should fall back to the funders. If no funder wants to pay for APCs in these journals, then very few people will publish in them. If a funder’s goal is to advance science at maximum efficiency, it makes sense to curb significant spending on publishing.

The change also has to come from the decision makers in hiring and promotion. Scientists shouldn’t solely rely on the journal name for what they choose to read and who they choose to hire and promote.

Q: The resolution calls on MIT schools and DLCs to “critically evaluate mentorship quality and scientific merit, rather than relying on unreliable proxies of merit, such as journal names and h-indexes, in hiring and promotions.” How would you like to see scientific merit evaluated? 

Mitchell-Wang: I think, fundamentally, to evaluate scientific merit, you really have to read the work and think about it. It’s a very precious thing that people do less these days.

Especially at places like MIT, we want to support science that will become transformative in 10 years or 20 years down the line. It takes a lot of vision and effort to dig out the hidden treasures rather than just the things that are hot in journals right now.

Warner: It’s a shortcut to see that something’s in Cell, and then you think it’s good.

Q: The School of Science has added mentorship to its faculty promotion and tenure guidelines. What do you think about that as a metric? 


Warner: It’s a good metric. But based on people’s backgrounds, there’s probably a variability in mentoring experience when they become a junior professor. Definitely more training would be good. I think administrative work, mentorship, and time and money management are probably things that most new faculty do not have a lot of experience in at all.

Q: What do you hope will happen with the resolution? 

Mitchell-Wang: There are several things we’d like to see the Libraries do, as laid out in the resolution: Continue examining existing access contracts with publishers like Nature and really think about whether it’s still worth paying for access contracts. Open access is becoming more and more popular and more people are paying for it. So why is the library still paying for blanket access if many papers are already open access?

The second thing is for the Libraries to continue identifying areas where people don’t have good open access options and to create more of these publishing contracts, like the existing ones with eLife and Royal Society of Chemistry – publishers that are more affordable and friendly to open access.

Q: If you had to choose one aspect of scholarly publishing to change, what would it be? 

Warner:
 I’d say the structure of the paper. I think it does not lead to reporting the best science, and it doesn’t let you report negative results. Publishing null results would encourage people to share more about their research, save resources when people also do the same thing and they don’t know it won’t work, and reduce research fraud.

Mitchell-Wang: For me, it’s about how we evaluate manuscripts. I think peer reviewers should focus on the rigor of the study: what they’re claiming, do they have evidence to support it, and whether there are logical flaws. Of course, academia as a culture is coded with prestige, and that’s hard to fight, but I do think there’s a lot of work that can be done to bring creative work to people’s attention and not just reinforce what people have already been reading.