Current 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: 2006 news, 2005 news, 2004 news, 2003 news, 2002 and earlier news.

September 2008

As of April 7, 2008 anyone who publishes an article based upon research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is required to submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscript to PubMed Central. This groundbreaking policy gives the public full access to taxpayer-funded research within 12 months of its publication.

For more information and instructions on how to comply, go to the Reshaping Scholarly Communication NIH policy pages:

February 2008

The Harvard Arts and Sciences Faculty voted unanimously to adopt a policy that makes them the first university in the US to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications. Read more about it in the New York Times (2/12/2008) and in Open Access News.
University of California faculty are also reviewing and discussing a UC Open Access Policy.

January 2008

UC Berkeley announces a fund to subsidize open access and paid access fees. The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication

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..."