On February 12, 2008, 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. The driving force behind the adoption of this policy was professor of computer science, Stuart Shieber. Professor Shieber currently heads Harvard’s Office of Scholarly Communication and will share his experience on how this ground-breaking policy was passed and what steps Harvard has taken to implement it.

Please join your colleagues for this public talk on:

Date: Monday, March 30
Time: 3:30 – 5:00
Location: Toll Room, Alumni House

Read more about the Harvard Open Access policy at:

• Chronicle of Higher Education (2/12/08) (UC access only)
• The New York Times (2/12/08)
• Open Access News

This event is co-sponsored by the Academic Senate Library Committee, The Library and the School of Information (iSchool).

January 21, 2009: The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) turns one year old today. BRII supports faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication. So far we are very pleased with the results. We have received 40 requests for funding, indicating that there is interest and a need for funding of open access journal articles. The requests span life and physical and the social sciences. This is an 18 month pilot project. For more information on the pilot along with instructions on how to apply for funding for your open access journal article go to the BRII website.

The California Digital Library (CDL) and Springer have signed a ground-breaking agreement in which UC-authored articles accepted in most of the 1700 Springer journals will be published using Springer Open Choice which brings with it full and immediate to all readers. This means that UC authors will will pay no additional publication fees in order for their articles to be immediately and fully open to all. Under this agreement, articles will be published under a license in which authors retain the right to distribute and re-use their articles freely.

The UC-Springer agreement is the first large-scale open access experiment of its type undertaken with a major commercial publisher in North America. In 2008, some 1500 journal articles by UC-affiliated authors were published in Springer journals. Please note that there are several Springer titles ineligible for this program. See the complete list of ineligible titles (PDF)

For more information, see the joint press release (PDF), talk to your library liaison or contact the UCB Library Scholarly Communication Officer.

Read more about the pilot in The Daily Californian (1/28/09).

Open Access is a growing international movement based on the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately upon publication. Find out more about open access and how to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge at a special, international event sponsored by the Free Speech Movement Educational Series, the UC Berkeley Library and the Berkeley chapter of the Students for Free Culture:

Tuesday, October 14
6:30pm – 8:30pm
FSM Café, Moffitt Library

Featuring Professors Michael Eisen (UCB), Philip Bourne (UCSD) and student videos. Free food and drink! Prizes and giveaways! Find out more about open access at: Hot Topics: Open Access and at Open Access Day.

UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education has received funding from the A.W. Mellon Foundation to continue their look into faculty practices and expectations for different modes of scholarly communication. To date, a planning study has been finished, and an interim report for phase 2 has just become available.

The planning study surfaced a finding that scholars' pre-publication communication styles and needs differ from those they hold when ready to publish. Final Report for Planning Grant, Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models

Draft Interim Report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them. Diane Harley, Sarah Earl-Novell, Sophia Krzys Acord, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King. CSHE.8.2008 (May 2008)

As described by the authors, "Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.