[GOAL] Fwd: UCSF Passes Open Access Policy

[Stevan Harnad]

Please register all OA mandates in ROARMAP:
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Begin forwarded message:

> From: LIBLICENSE <liblicense at GMAIL.COM>
> Date: May 23, 2012 11:06:47 PM EDT
> To: <LIBLICENSE-L at listserv.crl.edu>
> Subject: UCSF Passes Open Access Policy
> 
> From: "Taylor, Anneliese" <Anneliese.Taylor at ucsf.edu>
> Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 00:32:57 +0000
> 
> University of California, San Francisco Press Release
> May 23, 2012
> 
> 
> UCSF IMPLEMENTS POLICY TO MAKE RESEARCH PAPERS FREELY ACCESSIBLE TO PUBLIC
> 
> Health Sciences Campus Becomes Largest in Nation to Adopt Open-access Policy
> 
> The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of
> current and future scientific articles freely available to the public,
> helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and
> scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.
> 
> The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest
> scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy
> and among the first public universities to do so.
> 
> “Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone
> who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general
> public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,” said
> Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee
> on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative
> at UCSF. “The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers
> to scientific research,” he said. “By opening the currently closed
> system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the
> taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in
> research.”
> 
> UCSF is the nation’s largest public recipient of funding from the
> National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year,
> valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads
> to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded,
> peer-reviewed scientific journals, but the majority of those papers
> are only available to subscribers who pay ever-increasing fees to the
> journals. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends
> close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals.
> 
> Such restrictions and costs have been cited among the obstacles in
> translating scientific advances from laboratory research into improved
> clinical care.
> 
> The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles
> freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and
> thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google
> Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national
> open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or
> published as open-access publications. They will then be available to
> be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.
> 
> Schneider said hurdles do remain, including convincing commercial
> publishers to modify their exclusive publication contracts to
> accommodate such a policy. Some publishers already have demonstrated
> their willingness to do so, he said, but others, especially premier
> journals, have been less inclined to allow the system to change.
> 
> Under terms negotiated with the NIH, a major proponent of open access,
> some of the premier journals only allow open access in PubMed Central
> one year after publication; prior to that only the titles and
> summaries of articles are freely available.  How such journals will
> handle the UCSF policy remains to be seen, Schneider said.
> 
> The UCSF policy gives the university a nonexclusive license to
> distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in
> scientific or medical journals. Researchers are able to “opt out” if
> they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher
> is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy.  “The hope,” said
> Schneider, “is that faculty will think twice about where they publish,
> and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the
> policy.”
> 
> Full press release:
> http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/05/12056/ucsf-implements-policy-make-research-papers-freely-accessible-public
> 
> Full text of policy and supporting documents
> http://senate.ucsf.edu/2011-2012/j-lib-openaccess.html
> 
> Jennifer O’Brien Interim Executive Director/News
> Source: Kristen Bole (415) 502-6397 (NEWS)
> E-mail: Kristen.Bole at ucsf.edu
> Web: www.ucsf.edu
> Twitter: @KristenBole
> 
> Anneliese Taylor
> Head of Collection Management
> University of California, San Francisco Library
> 530 Parnassus Avenue
> San Francisco, CA 94143-0840
> (415) 476-8415
> anneliese.taylor at ucsf.edu

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