UC Berkeley supports a variety of ways our authors can participate in open access publishing. At its heart, open access literature is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (Suber, 2019). Open access materials can be read and used by anyone.
But you might be wondering, why is UC Berkeley concerned about trying to make research more openly available and accessible? Well, one fundamental reason is that the research and teaching mission of the UC includes the aim of “transmitting advanced knowledge,” and as part of doing that, our faculty, researchers, and students create and share their scholarship.
This system of scholarly publishing includes traditional publications such as peer-reviewed academic articles, scholarly chapters or books, and conference proceedings. It also includes other types of publications such as digital projects, data sets and visualizations, and working papers.
In this blog post, we’ll provide an update on how the UC Berkeley Library is fostering open access book publishing. And we’ll also highlight the current progress on supporting OA publishing of scholarly articles.
Library Support for Open Access Books
We know that not all University of California authors are publishing journal articles, and many disciplines—such as arts, humanities, and social sciences—focus on the scholarly monograph as the preferred mode of publishing. Some open access book publishers charge authors (or an author’s institution) a fee in exchange for publishing the book open access, similar to the practice of academic journal publishers charging an “article processing charge” to make a research article open access.
Book authors can realize a variety of benefits with open access publishing, including increasing the reach of their scholarship, building relationships within their academic discipline, garnering more citations, making their scholarly books more affordable for students, improving accessibility for print-disabled users, and more.
UC Berkeley is supporting authors who wish to publish their books open access. The library provides funding assistance and access to publishing platforms and tools for authors to make their books OA.
Berkeley Research Impact Initiative books
The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is a program to foster broad public access to the work of scholars by encouraging the UCB community to take advantage of open access publishing opportunities—including books and journal articles. BRII is the local open access fund that helps defray the costs associated with publishing open access books and research articles. For books, BRII can contribute up to $10,000 per book for it to be published open access. Below are recent UCB-authored books published with the assistance of BRII.
The Equitably Resilient City
- Zachary B. Lamb (Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley) and Lawrence J. Vale (MIT)
- MIT Press
- Open Access download
Apartheid Remains
- Sharad Chari (Associate Professor, Geography, UC Berkeley)
- Duke University Press
- Open Access download
Models, Measurement, and Metrology Extending the SI: Trust and Quality Assured Knowledge Infrastructures
- William P. Fisher, Jr. (Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley), Leslie Pendrill (RISE Research Institutes of Sweden)
- De Gruyter
- Open Access download
Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema
- Linda Haverty Rugg (Professor of Scandinavian Culture, Literature and Film, UC Berkeley)
- University of Minnesota Press
- Open Access download
Springer Open Access books
Since 2021, the UC Berkeley Library has had an institutional open access book agreement with Springer Nature. The partnership provides open access funding to UC Berkeley affiliated authors who have books accepted for publication in Springer, Palgrave, and Apress imprints. This means that these authors can publish their books open access at no direct cost to them. The agreement covers all disciplines published by Springer. Every book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for free access and downloading. Here are a few recent books published open access as a result of the UCB-Springer agreement.
University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal
- Mara Welsh Mahmood (School of Education, UC Berkeley), John Cano (School of Education, UC Berkeley), Marjorie Elaine (School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA)
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Open Access download
This open access edited volume reports on a unique network of innovative in-school and out-of-school programs, University-Community Links (UC Links), which is coordinated through the UC Links Office in the Berkeley School of Education. UC Links connects university faculty and students with young people and their families in diverse communities around the world. University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal includes 20 chapters describing university-community partnerships and programs in California in the US as well as Germany, Italy, Spain, Uganda, and Uruguay (both in English and Spanish!). The volume also includes first-person reflections describing how participation in UC Links programs has transformed participants’ thinking about teaching and learning and also has transformed individual lives.
Co-editor Mara Welsh Mahmood says:
“It was imperative to all contributing authors that the knowledge and experiences described in this volume be accessible to anyone interested in learning more about these university-community partnership programs. Authors envisioned using the chapters in their courses and also being able to share them with school and community partners without associated costs. The UC Berkeley Open Access agreement with Springer allows this book to be given away—young people who contributed first-person narratives can share this with their families and friends; academic scholars interested in developing a partnership with a local school or community can easily point people to the book to learn more about what these partnerships can look like in practice. Already the book has been accessed 16,000 times after two months of publication!”
Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century
- Margaret W. Conkey (Professor Emerita of Anthropology, UC Berkeley), Oscar Moro Abadía (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Josephine McDonald (University of Western Australia)
- Springer
- Open Access download
University of California Press
UC Berkeley Library continues to support open access book publishing via Luminos, the open access arm of the University of California Press. The Library membership with Luminos means that UC Berkeley authors who have books accepted for publication through the UC Press can publish their book open access with a heavily discounted book processing charge. When combined with additional funding support through BRII, a UC Berkeley book author could potentially publish their book open access with the costs being covered fully by the Library. Luminos books are published under Creative Commons licenses with free downloads.
Pressbooks platform & workshops
The UC Berkeley Library hosts an instance of Pressbooks, an online platform through which the UCB community members can create open access books, open educational resources (OER), and other types of digital scholarship.
The Scholarly Communication & Information Policy (SCIP) office continues to offer twice/year Pressbooks workshop and demo where participants can learn how to navigate the platform and create and publish their own eBooks and open educational resources. (Note: we just hosted a workshop in September, but watch out for another one coming soon.)
Every year during the fall semester SCIP hosts an author panel to unpack the process of turning a dissertation into a book. One of the topics discussed during the panel are options for open access publishing. RSVP now for the upcoming author panel on November 12, 2024, 11:00am-12:30pm.
UC contributing to the broader ecosystem of open access book publishing
A goal of the UC Libraries is to strategically advance open scholarship by extending its support for OA book publishing. At the systemwide level, the UC is contributing to several open access book publishing ventures, including Opening the Future, MIT’s Direct to Open, the University of Michigan Press’ Fund to Mission, and the Open Book Collective. In general, these models secure investments from libraries or other stakeholders, and agree to publish some or all of their frontlist books open access, with limited or zero direct cost to the authors. The backlist books are made accessible to participating institutions.
Library Support for Open Access Articles
While the topic of this post focuses mainly on open access books, UC Berkeley (and the UC more generally) offers a wide range of support to help authors publish scholarly articles. The UC’s system-wide Open Access Policies ensure that university-affiliated authors can deposit their final, peer-reviewed research articles into eScholarship, our institutional repository, immediately upon publication in a journal. Once they’re in eScholarship, the articles may be read by anyone for free (not to mentioned preserved for longer term access).
As of October 2024, the University of California has entered into 24 system-wide Open Access Publishing Agreements and Discounts with scholarly publishers (most recently a new agreement with Taylor & Francis). These agreements permit UC corresponding authors to publish open access in covered journals, with the publishing fees being covered in part (or in full) by the UC. In fiscal year 2023-24 UC Berkeley authors published 527 open access articles as a part of these system wide open access publishing agreements.
Locally, the UC Berkeley Library continues to offer the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII). This program helps UC Berkeley authors defray article processing charges (APCs) that are sometimes required to publish in fully open access journals (note that BRII doesn’t reimburse authors for publishing in “hybrid” journals—that is, subscription journals that simply offer a separate option to pay to make an individual article open access). This past year BRII provided funding for the publication of 45 open access articles. UC Berkeley authors can take advantage of BRII assistance where there is no other system wide open access agreement in place.
Wrapping up
In this post, we highlighted several ways that the University of California—and specifically UC Berkeley—is supporting scholarly authors to create and share open access books. In addition to providing financial assistance, platforms, and publishing guidance, the Library is committed to promoting the broader OA book publishing ecosystem. We’ll continue to explore a variety of approaches to support the UC Berkeley community (and beyond) who wish to publish books on open access terms.
If you’re interested to learn more about how you can create and publish an open access book, visit our website or send an email to schol-comm@berkeley.edu.