Institutional OA funds in the news

Read about the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) in the May 2010 issue of PLoS Biology. In Institutional Open Access Funds: Now Is The Time, authors Eckman and Weil describe how this innovative program has helped to increase the amount of Berkeley research universally accessible to readers by proving funding to pay open access fees. The project has also promoted faculty retention of publishing rights, fostered dialogue between libraries, researchers and journal publishers, and, ultimately encouraged a more sustainable scholarly communication environment.


Springer open access pilot

The California Digital Library (CDL) and Springer have signed a ground-breaking agreement in which UC-authored articles accepted in most of the 1700 Springer journals will be published using Springer Open Choice which brings with it full and immediate access to all readers. This means that UC authors will pay no additional publication fees in order for their articles to be immediately and fully open to all. Under this agreement, articles will be published under a license in which authors retain the right to distribute and re-use their articles freely.

The UC-Springer agreement is the first large-scale open access experiment of its type undertaken with a major commercial publisher in North America. In 2008, some 1500 journal articles by UC-affiliated authors were published in Springer journals. Please note that there are several Springer titles ineligible for this program. See the complete list of ineligible titles (PDF)

For more information, see the UC’s Reshaping Scholarly Communication website, talk to your library liaison or contact the UCB Library Scholarly Communication Officer.

Read more about the pilot in The Daily Californian (1/28/09).


Report on Publishing at UC

April 2008: Based on travels to all ten UC campuses and interviews with more than 100 faculty members and administrators, a new report Publishing Needs and Opportunities at the University of California "examines current publishing activities within the UC system" in and environment that is "under pressure from a number of forces, including the escalating cost of scientific journals, cutbacks in monograph publication on the part of many publishers, and opportunities for new kinds of publishing created by digital technologies."

The report recommends a number of steps for the University of California including the establishment of a university publishing program and a systemwide discussion of traditional notions of peer review as it relates to nontraditional publishing. The report was co-authored by Catherine Candee, Director of Publishing and Strategic Initiative, California Digital Library and Lynne Withey, Director of the University of California Press.

Read coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4/4/08) (UC access only).

 


UC Provost: Support for the NIH Policy

On behalf of the University of California, UC Provost Wyatt R. Hume sent a letter to California Senators Feinstein and Boxer (PDF) expressing support for the NIH policy on public access. Writes Provost Hume: "The provision maximizes research impact and dissemination of new knowledge…."

In the letter, Provost Hume also echoes sentiments of a recent open letter of 26 Nobel laureates urging Congress to enact this "enlightened policy to ensure that the results of research conducted by the NIH can be more readily accessed, shared and built upon to maximize the return on our collective investment in science and to further the public good."


Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation

Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward (PDF)

The UC libraries released a report describing their work on "value-based" prices for scholarly journals. Authored by a task force of the ten-campus library system's Collection Development Committee, the value-based pricing report reflects the UC libraries' collective strategic priority to advance scholarly communication systems that are economically balanced and sustainable. The report details UC's rationale for value-based journal prices and provides models of prices for scholarly materials that are reasonable, transparent, and based upon the value of the material to the academic mission of the University of California.

Press Release (PDF)