On May 20, the Academic Senate of the University of California at Santa Cruz adopted a Resolution on Scholarly Publishing. (1) 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. (2) 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....It is hard for academic evaluations to avoid using the prestige of particular outlets, from journals to performance venues, as a metric for quality. By so doing, however, the power of some publishers and some performance venues, and their ability to charge high and rising prices, is maintained. This resolution proposes that an appropriate group of faculty be asked to find ways of circumventing this problem." (3) 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." (4) 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."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/03/2005 09:11:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
