2006 News

Highlights of 2006 news affecting scholarly communication, with emphasis on University of California-related news.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.