Recent News & Issues

See below for current news about scholarly communications issues, with emphasis on news from and affecting the University of California.

News and events from previous years: 2005 news, 2004 news, 2003 news, 2002 and earlier news.

September 2007

• UC Provost Wyatt R. Hume writes a letter to California Senators Feinstein and Boxer encouraging their support of proposed changes to strengthen the NIH policy on public access to research results. In the letter Hume says that the policy goals, including the expanded use of NIH research findings for the advancement of science and public health, "are shared by UC health scientists and by researchers worldwide."

August 2007

• The UC Office of Scholarly Communication releases "Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University Of California" which analyzes over 1,100 survey responses representative of all disciplines and tenure-track faculty ranks. The survey reveals deep concern about the health of scholarly communication, especially in its relationship to promotion and tenure.

July 2007

• Citing the "obvious potential for this policy to be beneficial to the broader scholarly community" the UC Academic Senate conveys their review of the UC Open Access Proposal. The review also included significant concerns with policy implementation and explored a concern about the risk of additional burdens on the faculty. In asking the Provost to address the concerns raised, the Council says it "looks forward to a second review of the draft Open Access Policy" and "hopes it can decide to endorse the policy at that time."
• Twenty-six US Nobel laureates, including UCSF Chancellor Michael bishop and three others with UC affiliation, write an open letter to Congress calling for the results of research funded by the NIH to be made publicly available. "We believe that the time is now for Congress to enact this enlightened policy to ensure that the results of research conducted by 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." At the time of the letter, the appropriations committees of both houses included the policy language in their bills; later in July the House of Representatives passed the bill with the language intact.
• With the UC Press and other principals among their informants, Ithaka issues "University Publishing in a Digital Age" a study which calls on university presses to focus more on online publication, including books, to collaborate on the development of publishing infrastructure, and to "provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors."

June 2007

• The University of California, the University of Michigan and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) co-sponsor "New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing."
• Saying that it "has long viewed the sharing of research materials and tools as a fundamental responsibility of scientific authorship," the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announces a policy that will require its scientists to publish the results of their research in journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication. The costs associated with making original research articles publicly available will be covered by the Institute as a result of agreements that the Institute has concluded with several major publishers. Forty-three UC faculty members are Howard Hughes Investigators and five of the UC campuses host Hughes Laboratories.

March 2007

• The University of California Press announces its launch of a new book series in literary studies called FlashPoints. Each book in the series "will be available in an innovative dual format: as a free digital edition, which will allow the work to reach a broader international audience, and as a reasonably-priced paperback."
• The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at UC Berkeley is awarded a grant of more than $400,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue its research into the changing nature of scholarly communication and publication practices. The new project, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them, is under the direction of principal investigators Jud King and Diane Harley.

February 2007

• Citing the University of California Senate's recommendation that the University take action "to facilitate scholarly communication and maximize the impact of the scholarship of UC faculty," Provost Rory Hume asks the UC Chancellors and Academic Senate to review a proposed Open Access Policy. The policy proposes that UC faculty authors of published articles or conference proceedings retain their copyright but routinely give the University non-exclusive permission to make their research findings available in a publicly accessible online repository such as UC's eScholarship repository.
• The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (a consortium of 12 research universities, including the 11 members of the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago) releases a draft Provosts' Statement On Publishing Agreements. It includes an addendum to publication aggreements through which scholars can retain copyright rights they need for enhanced access to and use of their work.

January 2007

• The UC libraries announce 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 Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is a direct outcome of the UC libraries' collective strategic priority to advance economically balanced and sustainable scholarly communication systems. The report details UC's rationale for value-based journal prices and modeling 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.
• The American Society of Cell Biologists, whose Executive Committee is led by UC San Francisco's Bruce M. Alberts, released the ASCB Position on Public Access to Scientific Literature which says, in part, "The sooner findings are shared, the faster they will lead to new scientific insights and breakthroughs. This conviction has motivated the ASCB to provide free access to all of the research articles in Molecular Biology of the Cell two months after publication, which it has done since 2001..."

August 2006

• Several publishers announce programs which allow authors to make their articles open access upon publication. These include John Wiley & Sons with its Funded Access hybrid journal program, the Cambridge University Press with its Cambridge Open Option hybrid journal program, the American Chemical Society which launched its AuthorChoice hybrid journal program, and the American Physical Society with its Free To Read hybrid journal program.
• The National Endowment for the Humanities established guidelines that give preference to projects that include open online access to results.

July 2006

• The provosts of 25 research universities jointly release an open letter that strongly backs the Federal Research Public Access Act (see May news item) and encourages higher education to prepare for a new way of disseminating research findings. UC Provost and Executive Vice President Rory Hume is among the signatories. (An article in Inside Higher Education covers the development.)
• Former UC provost C. Judson King and five co-authors at Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education release their report titled Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models. The study explores "academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty," and includes case studies based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders - faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors - in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics.

June 2006

• The Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its open-access policy, which, while letting the eight separate Research Councils go their own way, reaffirms the overall "commitment to the guiding principles that publicly funded research must be made available and accessible for public examination as rapidly as practical." On the day of the announcement three fo the councils - the Medical Research Council, Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) - had already decided to mandate open access to the research they fund.

May 2006

• On May 10th the UC Academic Assembly accepted the white papers of the Academic Council's Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (see April 2006 item below) and unanimously approved the proposal on a UC Faculty Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy. On May 30th John Oakley, chair of the UC Academic Senate conveyed the proposed policy and a request to UC President Dynes to appoint a working group to "refine the proposal in preparation for full Senate and Administrative review and adoption as expeditiously as possible."
• On May 2nd Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) in the US Senate (full text of the bill; FAQ from Cornyn's Office). The bill requires every federal agency with an annual research budget of more than $100 million - including NASA, the EPA, NSF, and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation - to implement a policy for public access to research results, providing such access no more than 6 months after publication.

April 2006

• On April 17th The UC Academic Council - the executive committee of the full Academic Assembly - accepted the white papers of their Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (see December 2005 item below), and committed to forwarding the papers to the Academic Assembly along with a resolution recommending that the UC President appoint a working group to review and refine the UC Faculty Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy and ultimately to adopt and implement the policy "as soon as feasible."
• The eScholarship Repository hit the milestone of 3 million full-text downloads. It took eighteen months to reach the first million, about nine months to reach the second million, and 166 days to reach the 3 million download mark.

January 2006

• MIT developed a Copyright Amendment Form and related services to help its authors retain the rights they need to authorize open access.
• A report from the National Science Foundation (NSF) describes the importance of and endorses open access to data. See Cyberinfrastructure Vision For 21st Century Discovery.