University of California at Santa Cruz

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

On May 20, 2005, the Academic Senate of the University of California at Santa Cruz adopted a Resolution on Scholarly Publishing.
 * The resolution is dated October 8, because that is when it was submitted to the Faculty Senate for discussion. The Faculty Senate adopted it on October 24.
 * Summary: Elsevier journals cost 50% of the UC online serials budget but attracted only 25% of the usage. Elsevier profits rose 26% the previous year. Elsevier has been inflexible in negotiations. Taking the University of California system in its entirety, 10-15% of Elsevier content was written by UC faculty, 1,000 UC faculty serve on Elsevier editorial boards, and 150 serve as senior editors. The resolution recommends using the California Digital Library, the related eScholarship Repository, and peer-reviewed OA journals from PLoS and BMC. It urges faculty to retain copyright, the right of postprint archiving, and the right to distribute copies of their work to their classes. "Therefore, the UCSC Academic Senate resolves to call upon its tenured members to give serious and careful consideration to cutting their ties with Elsevier: no longer submitting papers to Elsevier journals, refusing to referee the submissions of others, and relinquishing editorial posts. The Senate also calls upon its Committee on Academic Personnel to recognize that some faculty may choose not to submit papers to Elsevier journals even when those journals are highly ranked. Faculty choosing to follow the advice of this resolution should not be penalized."
 * The resolution is dated May 9, because that is when it was submitted to the Academic Senate for discussion. The Senate adopted it on May 20.
 * Summary: To control prices, when publishers propose "systemwide contracts for access to online content with prices which exceed the consumer price index by more than 1.5% in any one year averaged over five years," then the Libray Committee of the Academic Senate will be asked to comment on the offer. To prevent prestige-seeking from rewarding journals that charge exorbitant prices, the university will create a task force "to explore ways to meet the challenge of academic evaluation in an era when publication and performance possibilities are changing." To help faculty negotiate more beneficial contracts with publishers, the university will "take urgent steps to explore the restructuring of the University's copyright policy to assert a collective right, under the direction of individual faculty, to distribute faculty work for research and teaching....Our intention is that scholarly work would remain the property of individual faculty, but faculty members would no longer have to struggle individually with publishers to retain the right to disseminate their work." And to preserve digital scholarship, the university will "explore the establishment of an Office of Scholarly Communication or similar administrative unit to take responsibility for the persistent stewardship of all forms of scholarly communication."