California, Universities of California - system

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

• Summary: The letter cites and summarizes the preceding actions taken by several of the UC campuses (above) and announces the cancellation of "approximately 200" journals. "The economics of scholarly journal publishing are incontrovertibly unsustainable. Taming price inflation is not enough. Unless we change the current model, academic libraries and universities will be unable to continue providing faculty, students, and staff with the access they require to the world's scholarship and knowledge. Scholars will be unable to make the results of their research widely available. These are not statements about any single company, about the strengths and weaknesses of for- and not-for-profit publishing, or about the prospects of open-access versus subscription-based journal models. They are merely observations about economic reality....[W]e are have been paying more for access to a smaller proportion of the world's published knowledge. If we are to halt or even reverse that trend, we must aggressively ramp up and institutionalize our efforts to change the scholarly communication process....The UC Libraries are working aggressively to...support alternative means for publishing scholarly materials that make high-quality peer-reviewed work available at an affordable price."
• The university created a Special Committee on Scholarly Communication to examine new methods of scholarly communication.
• Also see the web site on scholarly communication created by the University of California libraries (systemwide), which recommends that faculty "[s]upport open access journals and self-archiving".
• On April 29, 2003, the UC Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee adopted a resolution on Digital Library Journal Collecting Principles. "To align costs with value, the Committee recommends that UC libraries, in close consultation with the faculty, initiate a Systemwide review and renegotiation of the University's contracts with publishers whose pricing practices are not sustainable."
• Jennifer Murphy, Library struggles to fund access, Daily Bruin, November 17, 2003.
• Elsevier issued its own press release on the California contract, emphasizing the volume of material the deal makes accessible to California users, January 10, 2004.
• Anon., UC System Inks Five Year Deal with Elsevier, Stops Price Inflation, Library Journal, January 14, 2004.
• Yvette Essen, Market Report, The Telegraph, January 20, 2004. Whether budget cuts in California will force the University of California to renegotiate its contract with Elsevier. Blog summary.
• List of Elsevier titles for which the University of California libraries currently have subscriptions.
• Open letter from the UC Academic Council and university librarians to UC faculty about rising journal prices, January 14, 2005.

On March 10, 2005, the University of California Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee adopted a Resolution on The University's Role in Fostering Positive Change in Scholarly Communication.

• Summary. High journal prices have created "a state of crisis that threatens to compromise the University of California's core mission." The committee calls on the university administration to "support publications and publishing innovations that disseminate scholarship to the broadest set of readers at the most affordable cost" and "establish and sustain repositories and alternative publishing mechanisms that enable the broadest dissemination of UC's scholarship". It also calls on the university faculty to "seize every opportunity to regain control of and maximize the impact of their scholarly communication; manage their intellectual property in ways that allow retention of critical rights, in order to ensure the widest dissemination of UC's scholarship and its unfettered use within the University to support teaching and research;...eliminate affiliations with publishers whose publishing and pricing practices reveal a focus on profits at the expense of open scholarly publication; [and] support library actions that attempt to break the cycle of hyper-inflation in the cost of scholarly material even when such action reduces access to material."