This article was originally published on UCnet on July 22, 2024.
The University of California (UC) remains committed to protecting the rights of those who create and read academic research — not only for UC’s faculty, students, researchers and clinicians, but also for people around the world who stand to benefit from this research.
In a letter sent on June 19, 2024 (PDF version of the letter), UC President Michael V. Drake, M.D., and UC System Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Katherine S. Newman joined the UC Academic Senate to support the UC Libraries’ negotiations with publishers to protect these critical rights. “Collectively, the academy has created a corpus of scholarly literature; collectively, we need to ensure that it can be harnessed to advance our academic as well as public service missions, today and in the future,” they wrote.
As technology advances, UC must continue to protect and advocate for free and open access to knowledge. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies are transformative, allowing scholars to achieve new insights and breakthroughs in research at an unprecedented pace. To preserve researchers’ rights to analyze scholarly literature using both existing and emerging research strategies, UC is proactively negotiating with publishers who are attempting to restrict scholars from utilizing these groundbreaking tools.
The UC Academic Senate, President Drake and Provost Newman unanimously support the UC Libraries, building on the existing systemwide commitment that has characterized UC’s advancement of open access and open scholarship since the University made headlines for its split with Elsevier in 2019. As a result of UC’s negotiations, UC now has transformative open access agreements with 15 scholarly journal publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley. More than half of UC research is eligible to be published open access with financial support from the UC Libraries.
“The historic and ongoing partnership of the University of California’s faculty and libraries has empowered the University to pursue its strategic interests in publisher negotiations,” concluded Drake and Newman in their June 19 letter. “Critically, this work requires all of us to remain engaged to achieve our vision of a scholarly communications ecosystem that puts our university mission first.”
