SPARC Highlights Open Access

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) highlighted in a newsletter last month a modest but innovative programs to pay for author's open access (OA) charges at the University of California (UC), Berkeley.

UC–Berkeley's Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program cosponsored by the university librarian and the vice chancellor for research, launched in January of this year. Faculty who wish to publish in open access journals can apply for up to $3000 to cover costs. The pilot stage of the program will last 18 months, or until the initial $125,000 allocated to the fund runs out, with the goal of making the fund permanent.

The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill has launched a $10,000 fund, offering awards of up to $1000 per article, and University of Wisconsin–Madison has put forth $50,000 from the library's gift fund.

Berkeley university librarian Tom Leonard acknowledged the program is experimental. “Nobody has an explanation of how this will work permanently,” he conceded. Nevertheless, the program is an important step in building momentum, he said, and helping “change the behavior of faculty to embrace open access and start to write the fees into their grant processes.”

The Harvard University Law School (HLS) faculty last month followed the lead of their colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) by voting unanimously to make their scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a “mandatory open access policy” via an institutional repository.

Under the new policy, HLS will require that articles authored by its faculty members be placed in an online open access repository. The measure comes just months after the Harvard FAS approved its landmark policy. HLS is the first professional school at Harvard to approve the measure. The text of the HLS mandate mirrors closely the FAS policy.