Compact for open access publishing equity

On Monday, five major research universities – including the University of California, Berkeley – announced a new Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. The universities have each pledged to develop "durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals…" Besides UC Berkeley, the other participating universities are Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and MIT.

This compact further shows UC Berkeley’s interest in open access, already expressed through our Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program to "subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication."

For more information, check out the coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

 Originally posted on the Science and Engineering Libraries News blog.

 


Problem with links to U.S. government documents

UPDATE: The problem described below has been fixed.  

Because of a computer malfunction at the U.S. Government Printing Office, many of the links from our catalogs to online versions of U.S. documents are not working.  The GPO is working on the problem, but it may take some time to repair.

Meanwhile, we recommend searching Google using the title of the document and the agency that produced it.  This will often lead to a working online version.

Also, of course, our catalogs list many printed versions of documents, available in the Cal libraries. 

If you need a document and these strategies do not work, please contact the Doe Library Reference Desk or use our Government Information online reference services.


Constitution Day

Thursday, September 17 is Consitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of our country’s founding document.


Open Access Compact

September 15, 2009: Five universities including UC Berkeley have announced the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. Open access literature provides barrier-free access to information. Researchers from anywhere in the world can read scholarly output that has been made available in an open-access journal. A wider audience, in turn, has the potential to increase the impact of the research presented in an open-access article. Signatories of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity commit to the establishment of funds or other mechanisms for underwriting publication charges. When authors submit their articles to fee-based open-access journals, theses funds can be used to underwrite the publication charge.

UC Berkeley was an early adopter of the funding equity approach, having established an OA fund in January 2008. The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is available to any Berkeley professor, post doc or graduate student who wants to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication. According to Berkeley’s University Librarian Tom Leonard, "Publishers and researchers know that it has never been easier to share the best work they produce with the world. But they also know their traditional business model is creating new walls around discoveries. Universities can really help take down these walls and the open-access compact is a highly significant tool for the job."

For more information: