Tag: open access books

UC Berkeley’s Support for Open Access Book Publishing, January 2026

Posted on by Timothy Vollmer
Four academic book covers displayed side by side: 'Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI' by Nina Begus with a golden mask image; 'Movable Londons: Performance & The Modern City' by Julia H. Fawcett featuring a classical painting of a theater performance; 'The Values of the Vernacular: Essays in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures in Dialogue with Simon Gaunt' edited by Hannah Morcos and others, showing a medieval manuscript illustration; and 'Understanding Child Welfare' by Richard P. Barth and others from the Elgar Understanding Series, with a gradient blue and green cover design.
Recent books published open access by UC Berkeley authors with support from the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

UC Berkeley Library continues to support a variety of ways our authors can participate in open access (OA) publishing to contribute to UC’s research and teaching mission. This mission includes the practice of “transmitting advanced knowledge” by helping faculty, researchers, and students create and share their scholarship with peers, and the world.

While the system of scholarly publishing includes traditional publications such as peer-reviewed academic articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and more, read on below for some updates on how UC Berkeley Library—and the broader University of California system—is supporting authors in publishing open access books.

Berkeley’s Support for Open Access Books

While many UC authors create academic journal articles as an output of their research, others focus on producing a scholarly book. Book authors can realize a variety of benefits with open access publishing, including increasing the reach of their scholarship, building relationships within their academic community, 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 UCB authors to make their books OA.

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is a program to foster broad public access to the work of UCB scholars by encouraging the Berkeley 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.

  • Understanding Child Welfare, by Jill Duerr Berrick, Richard P. Barth, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Antonio R. Garcia, Johanna K.P. Greeson, John Gyourko, and Brett Drake

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. All the books are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for free access and downloading.

Pressbooks platform & workshops

The UC Berkeley Library hosts an instance of Pressbooks (https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/), an online platform through which the UC Berkeley community can create open access books, open educational resources (OER), and other types of digital scholarship.

To learn more about how to create and publish your own eBooks on Pressbooks, join our upcoming demo and workshop on February 19, 2026. RSVP

An event flyer for the Berkeley Library titled "Publish Digital Books and Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks." The workshop is scheduled for February 19, 2026, from 11am to 12pm via Zoom. The design features a maroon background and a colorful "Open Access" lock logo.

Broader UC efforts for OA book publishing

A current goal of the UC Libraries is to strategically extend its support for OA book publishing. The UC is contributing to several open access book publishing ventures within the monograph publishing community, including Opening the Future, MIT’s Direct to Open, the University of Michigan Press’ Fund to Mission, the Open Book Collective, and more. These models secure investments from libraries and 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.

The UC is also pursuing three OA book publishing pilot projects with University of California Press, Duke University Press, and Oxford University Press. The efforts “will enable UC authors publishing books with select university presses to choose open access at no cost to them, and will also begin opening previously published books by UC authors.”

Finally, the UC Libraries has released a new report called Advancing Open Monograph Opportunities at UC. It outlines a “values-based framework, key recommendations, and practical strategies for advancing OA monograph publishing” across the UC system. Four recommendations presented in the report include:

  1. Strategic investment in BPC-based OA monograph initiatives that directly support authors and publishing programs aligned with UC research and teaching.
  2. Support for Diamond OA and free-to-read models that remove both author- and reader-facing fees while advancing bibliodiversity, multilingual scholarship, and community-led publishing.
  3. Strengthened partnerships with university presses, recognizing their central role as trusted stewards of peer-reviewed scholarship and their importance in the transition to open models.
  4. Investment in open, community-owned infrastructure and high-standards OA initiatives that support discoverability, metadata quality, preservation, and long-term sustainability.

Read the full report in eScholarship (UC’s institutional repository).

If you’re a UC Berkeley community member and 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.

Supporting open access book publishing at UC Berkeley: Fall 2025 Update

Posted on by Timothy Vollmer
A collection of 8 academic book covers displayed in a grid, covering topics including media studies, East Asian politics, archaeology, urban planning, indigenous studies, and library science.
A variety of UC Berkeley-authored books published open access.

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 scholarly 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 UCB 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 UCB scholars by encouraging the Berkeley 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.

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. All the books are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for free access and downloading. In the last year or so, there were two books published under the UCB-Springer OA books program, including Margaret Conkey’s Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century, and Mara Mahmood and John Cano’s University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal.

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 (https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/), an online platform through which the UC Berkeley community 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 an annual Pressbooks workshop and demo where participants can learn how to navigate the platform and create and publish their own eBooks and OERs.

UC contributing to the broader ecosystem of open access book publishing

A FY2024-25 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 supporting several open access book publishing ventures, including Opening the Future, MIT’s Direct to Open, the University of Michigan Press’ Fund to Mission, the Open Book Collective, and more. These models secure investments from libraries and 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.

The UC is also pursuing three pilot projects—with University of California Press, Duke University Press, and Oxford University Press—to enable the OA publication of UC-authored monographs. California Digital Library has also sponsored the opening of 35 UC-authored books included in the Big Ten Open Books collections.

Library Support for OA Journal Publishing

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.

As of August 2025, the University of California has 28 system-wide Open Access Publishing Agreements and Discounts with scholarly publishers. 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 2024-25 UC Berkeley authors published 1,032 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 44 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.

Open access book publishing at UC Berkeley: Fall 2024 update

Posted on by Timothy Vollmer
A closed book with a dark green cover. On the front of the book is an orange open lock symbol, commonly associated with open access. Inside the open lock, there is an orange hand icon with a finger pointing, representing open access to information or resources.
Image from Open Access: Initiatives of the Max Planck Society.

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.

Four book covers side by side, including The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis, Apartheid Remains, Models, Measurement, and Metrology Extending the SI: Trust- and Quality-Assured Knowledge Infrastructures, and Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema.

The Equitably Resilient City

Apartheid Remains

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

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.

Two book covers side by side, including University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal and Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century.

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.

Announcing a virtual event titled “From Dissertation to Book: Navigating the Publication Process.” The event is scheduled for November 12, 2024, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. via Zoom. The flyer prominently features the headshots of three speakers: • Raina Polivka • Stephanie L. Canizales • Yuanxiao Xu.

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.

Workshop Reminder — Publish Digital Books & Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks

Posted on by Timothy Vollmer
A presentation slide with dark red background, library logo, and text about the event that reads: "Public digital books and open educational resources with Pressbooks. Berkeley Library, Timothy Vollmer, Scholarly Communication + Copyright Librarian, Office of Scholarly Communication Services, September 20, 2023."

Date/Time: Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 11:00am–12:30pm
Location: Zoom only. Register via LibCal and you’ll receive the Zoom link for the event.

If you’re looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn why and how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. You’ll leave the workshop with a project already under way.

Curious about how UC Berkeley faculty, students, and staff have used Pressbooks? Check out some of the Berkeley-created digital books and resources below, or browse over 5,700 open access books on the Pressbooks Directory.

Six book covers from Pressbooks created by UC Berkeley faculty, students, and staff.

Romance Language Collections Newsletter no. 8 (Fall 2023)

Posted on by Claude Potts

This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library’s Get Help page.

Cinegramas: Revista Semanal (1934-36)
A substantial run of the Spanish weekly film magazine Cinegramas: Revista Semanal (1934-36) was acquired months before the Covid pandemic hit but can now be consulted in The Bancroft Library. It ceased publication with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936.
 What’s new in the Library for Fall 2023?

  • 2022-23 Serials Reductions
  • E-reserves & bCourses
  • Reference & Instruction
  • Library Workshops
  • Library Research Guides
  • New Books and More
  • Open Access Books
  • UC Library Search – 4 FAQs
  • Featured Digitized Work

See also:

Spring bloom: new ebooks from OpenEdition

Posted on by Claude Potts

Open Edition Books

It’s that time of year when we choose new ebook titles from OpenEdition. Below you will find a few that have made it to the list. Please send other recommendations to the Librarian for Romance Languages by April 1.

Since 2014, the UC Berkeley Library has supported this initiative based at the Université d’Aix-Marseille to open scholarly content from Europe and France in particular to the world. The Freemium program allows the UC Berkeley community to participate in an acquisitions policy that both supports sustainable development of open access (OA) and that respects the needs of teaching, research and learning communities. With our participation, faculty, students, and other researchers can benefit from greater functionality while making it possible for anyone in the world to view in html and in open access 70% of the ebook catalog of more than 13,000 titles.

Through the Freemium model, UC Berkeley gains access to preferred formats (pdf, epub, etc.) with no DRM quotas and seamless access to the content with UC Library Search.