Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Communication & Related Issues

Scholarly communication is the life-blood of the university’s teaching and research mission. Issues of copyright, intellectual property rights, and the long-term preservation of digital assets are posing new challenges to faculty, schools, & librarians.

Email this link:

UC Discounts on Article Publication Charges (APCs) for Open Access Journals

Open Access Policy 2013 for University of California

2013 UC Open Access Policy

The Academic Senate of the University of California has passed an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge.

The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty at all 10 campuses of the University of California, and as many as 40,000 publications a year.  It follows more than 175 other universities who have adopted similar so-called “green” open access policies.  By granting a license to the University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for future research publications.  Previously, publishers had sole control of the distribution of these articles.  All research publications covered by the policy will continue to be subjected to rigorous peer review; they will still appear in the most prestigious journals across all fields; and they will continue to meet UC’s standards of high quality.  Learn more about the policy and its implementation here: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/openaccesspolicy/

Latest news and updates from Regaining Control of Scholary Communications

Get a Waiver, Embargo, or Addendum for your Publisher

“Upon express direction by a Faculty member, the University of California will waive the license for a particular article or delay access to the article for a specified period of time.”              -UC Open Access Policy, July 24, 2013

 

Best Practices for Fair Use in Copyright

ARL Code of Best Practices for Fair USe for Academic and Resaerch Libraries

Webinar that summarizes Fair USe for Copyrighted material. The video runs 1:00 hour.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, a clear and easy-to-use statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use to support academic inquiry and higher education. 

Fair Use Checklist - Cornell University

"A proper use of this checklist should serve two purposes. First, it should help you to focus on factual circumstances that are important in your evaluation of fair use. The meaning and scope of fair use depends on the particular facts of a given situation, and changing one or more facts may alter the analysis. Second, the checklist can provide an important mechanism to document your decision-making process. Maintaining a record of your fair use analysis can be critical for establishing good faith. You should retain a copy of the checklist in connection with each "fair use" assertion you are making in your project."

Spreadsheet for tracking permission requests (XLS)

Deposit Your Work to eScholarship

eScholarship banner 

Deposit your work

Upload a copy of your article or provide a link to an open access version.  Initially, all authors used a manual deposit process to add their articles to eScholarship, UC’s open access repository and publishing platform. A new publication management system is being implemented to make participation easier for authors. Once the system is implemented at all ten campuses, those non-Senate UC authors covered by the Presidential Open Access Policy will be added.

US Federal Funder Public Access Policies

Agencies that sponsor research are interested in maximizing the value of that research. Increasingly, this means requiring the recipients of grants to make the results of their research – both scholarly articles and the data supporting them – freely available to the public.

Librarian Competencies in Support of Research Data Management, Scholarly Communication, Open Access

The profiles will help library managers identify skills gaps in their institutions, form the basis of job descriptions, enable professionals to carry out self-assessments, and act as a foundation for the development of training programs. 

What is Scholarly Communications?

Scholarly Communications is used to describe the process of academics, scholars and researchers have for sharing and publishing their  their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community.  Extending that definition, scholarly communications is also about the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavors. The background for this was the escalating prices that libraries were paying for "buying back" research that was conducted at their institutions by their own faculty members.  Today, the notion of scholarly communications includes a call for sustainable pricing from scholarly and commercial publishers.  It also encourages the awareness of the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavors. 

An understanding of scholarly communications assumes familiarity with:

  • author rights
  • the economics of scholarly resources
  • new models of publishing
  • open access
  • institutional repositories
  • rights and access to federally funded research
  • preservation of intellectual assets
  • copyright
  • plagiarism

Basic resources about Scholarly Communications include the following recommended materials:

protocols.io

Protocols.io is an open access platform for the creation and sharing of detailed methods and protocols. Features of protocols.io include:

  • Share methods before, during and after publication
  • Citable; add DOI to manuscripts 
  • Versioning: protocols can be kept up-to-date
  • Run protocols step-by-step in a browser or mobile
  • Open access platform
  • Forking, versioning, and commenting features
  • Archived in CLOCKSS

UC researchers currently have free access to Premium accounts during the pilot period (May 31, 2024). Premium features include private collaboration around method development and use in classrooms. In the long term, this initiative should also increase the reproducibility and rigor of the research published by UC academics. Use your UCI email when logging in to access these features.

Metrics Toolkit

Important Related Resources

The UCI Scholarly Communications Website is the major source of events and news regarding publishing and data issues at UCI.

Associations & Organizations

Timetable & History

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship (CC BY 4.0) (2018)

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, produced by Jason Schmitt, provides focus on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. This film is free to view both in personal and public venues. For more information please visit: Paywallthemovie.com
https://guides.lib.uci.edu/c.php?g=334324&p=2249887
guides.lib.uci.edu
CC-MAIN-2023-50
85106
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:USZ4U7YJMWMFORJNUSHG7N5R3S4SIYJI
<urn:uuid:4ba9b4c9-22c2-43c4-8806-b920f31d293a>
2023-12-05T08:19:39Z
34.194.39.199
text/html
sha1:EG7PLDXPQ5UHEK7L4ASOUNI65R62XKXG
<urn:uuid:4352e18c-370f-48c7-9615-d0538456be6d>
https://guides.lib.uci.edu/c.php?g=334324&p=2249887
response
<urn:uuid:d6be28c4-0c48-4687-9905-d26934f77b18>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-50
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-47
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/