October 2: The Berkeleyan, the campus faculty and staff newspaper, profiles the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) and the open access compact in which five universities (Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth and Cornell) have have pledged to underwrite "reasonable publication charges" for articles authored by their faculty in open-access journals.

Open access literature provides barrier-free access to information.
Researchers from anywhere in the world can read scholarly output that
has been made available in an open-access journal. A wider audience, in
turn, has the potential to increase the impact of the research
presented in an open-access article.

Traditional, for-profit journals owned by large multinational corporations like Elsevier and Springer, charge skyrocketing subscription rates which University Librarian Tom Leonard cites as "creating new walls around discoveries." The BRII open access fund, he adds, "can really
help take down these walls..."

Read more: A 'public option' for scholarship.