News
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Questions about U.S. federal funder public access policies? We have a page for that.
In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo requiring many federal agencies to develop policies ensuring that the research that they fund would be freely publicly available. It took time for the agencies to develop their plans, get them approved by OSTP, and release them to the public, but most of them have done it now. They’re not all easy to find, and once you find them it’s not always easy to to tell whether you’re looking at the most current version, or to understand the basic requirements. To help UC scholars […]
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University of California Press and California Digital Library partner with Collaborative Knowledge Foundation to build open source monograph publishing platform
California Digital Library and University of California Press are excited to announce their partnership with Collaborative Knowledge Foundation to develop Editoria, a new open source, digital-first book production platform. Through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of California Press (UCP) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have embarked on a project to build an open source platform for content and workflow management of book-length works. The goal of the project is to create a shared resource for presses and library publishers to automate book production in multiple formats using a versatile, web-based production […]
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Celebrate Fair Use Week 2016
This week UC Libraries join other organizations around the world in celebrating Fair Use Week, which honors the important doctrines of fair use in the United States and fair dealing in Canada and other jurisdictions. It’s a great time to learn about all the ways in which this important exception to the rights of copyright holders enhances our lives both inside and outside the university.
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UC linguistics faculty pledge support for Glossa, call for cancellation of Lingua
In November 2015, the editorial board of Lingua, a linguistics journal published by Elsevier, resigned en masse to begin a new open access journal, Glossa. The decision followed a series of disagreements with the publisher which are discussed in this post on Language Log. Several UC linguistics faculty have now issued a statement declaring their support for the new journal and urging their colleagues and the UC libraries to no longer support Lingua. In response, the UC libraries have informed Elsevier that they wish to cancel their subscription to Lingua. “The UC Linguistics faculty statement of support for Glossa reflects […]
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Groundbreaking University of California policy extends free access to all scholarly articles written by UC employees
Today the University of California expands the reach of its research publications by issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy, allowing future scholarly articles authored by all UC employees to be freely shared with readers worldwide. Building on UC’s previously-adopted Academic Senate open access (OA) policies, this new policy enables the university system and associated national labs to provide unprecedented access to scholarly research authored by clinical faculty, lecturers, staff researchers, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and librarians – just to name a few. Comprising ten campuses, five medical centers, and nearly 200,000 employees, the UC system is responsible for over 2% […]
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UC Libraries Statement on Authors Guild v. Google
The University of California libraries applaud the ruling by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals that Google’s digitization of library collections, creation of search functionality, display of snippets, and provision of copies to its partner libraries are all non-infringing fair uses. As an outcome of our partnership with Google, close to 4 million volumes digitized from UC library collections are held within the HathiTrust Digital Library, including many works that are in the public domain or long out of print. The digitization of these collections is a necessary foundation for 21st century scholarship, enabling richer discovery and engagement with […]
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Newly revised UC Copyright and Fair Use Policy and UC Copyright website better support students and staff
The University of California has issued a revised systemwide policy on Copyright and Fair Use, replacing the 1986 Policy on the Reproduction of Copyrighted Materials for Teaching and Research and its accompanying guidelines. The revised policy, which became effective July 9, 2015, is a clear statement by the University in support of copyright law, including the principle of fair use. The UC Copyright website, which has more detailed information about copyright and fair use for members of the UC community, has also been revised.
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UC Launches Robust Publication Management System in Support of Open Access Policy
By fall of 2015, all UC Senate faculty will have access to a new publication management system that searches scholarly databases for faculty article records, emails authors when new articles are found, and supports easy deposit of those articles into eScholarship, UC’s open access repository and publishing platform. This “harvesting” system is currently being implemented across the UC campuses in response to the Academic Senate’s call for an efficient mechanism for facilitating faculty participation in the UC Open Access policy. While the initial focus has been on supporting the Open Access Policy, the system also has the ability to connect to […]
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Celebrate Fair Use Week 2015
Members of the UC community rely on the “fair use” provision of US copyright law every day when sharing articles or images with their students, or when quoting or excerpting others’ works to create their own scholarship. Fair use allows for limited copying of copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright owner. Under certain conditions, copyrighted works may be used for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research. Colleges and universities across the country began celebrating “Fair Use Week” in 2014 in order to explain, celebrate, and promote fair […]
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Proposed Presidential Policy on Open Access Would Reach All Non-Senate UC Authors
[Editor’s note: this post is kept as an archive, but since the policy is no longer under review, some of the links go to pages that do not exist. For current UC policies, visit policy.ucop.edu.] Academic Senate faculty are currently the only University of California authors covered by a UC open access policy, but that may soon change. Provost Aimée Dorr recently distributed a draft proposal for a broader open access policy that would cover all other UC employees. Comments on the proposed policy are due by January 15, 2015. The text of the policy and its accompanying documents can be […]