University of California
Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee

Resolution I: The University’s Role in Fostering Positive Change in Scholarly Communication

Scholarly communication is in a state of crisis that threatens to compromise the University of California’s core mission. The crisis reduces the UC community’s access to scholarly materials and limits the dissemination of UC’s scholarship. A failure to respond will jeopardize UC’s pre-eminence, its contributions to scholarly inquiry and the progress of knowledge, its effectiveness in teaching and learning, and its service to the citizens of California.

It is critical that the University, and the worldwide academic community of which it is a part, regain control of and strengthen scholarly communication processes. In these pursuits the committee:

  • Calls upon the University to continue and extend its efforts to:


    • lead the academic community in its work toward effective and sustainable scholarly communication systems;


    • support publications and publishing innovations that disseminate scholarship to the broadest set of readers at the most affordable cost;


    • establish and sustain repositories and alternative publishing mechanisms that enable the broadest dissemination of UC’s scholarship;


    • develop incentives and support for faculty use of effective, sustainable scholarly publishing mechanisms;


    • leverage its libraries’ buying power to break the cycle of hyper-inflation in the cost of scholarly material by refusing to pay unsustainable prices.


  • Calls upon the University’s faculty to continue and extend their efforts 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;


    • recognize and value their colleagues’ use of any venue for scholarly communication that meets standards of excellence in selection and peer-review;


    • o eliminate affiliations with publishers whose publishing and pricing practices reveal a focus on profits at the expense of open scholarly publication;


    • 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.

Approved by the Committee March 10, 2005