Anyone who has ever worked at the sprawling empire known as the University of California knows that getting anything done across the diversity of 10 “separate and not so equal” campuses can be…uh…difficult. That is why when I heard the news today that the University Faculty Senate had mandated that all “future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge” I had to check to make sure the sun was still in the sky.
But seriously, kudos to the UC Faculty Senate for finally mandating open access across the university. It was the culmination of a six-year process that included two years of formal review and revision. After all, this is UC. Nothing is done quickly.
They are not the first to pass such a mandate, nor will they be the last, but the sheer size of the university will ensure that the impact is substantial. As the press release takes pains to point out, “UC is the largest public research university in the world and its faculty members receive roughly 8% of all research funding in the U.S.”
Even more importantly from my perspective, all of this content is destined for the California Digital Library-managed eScholarship Repository, for which I was the initial technical architect. eScholarship, initially under the leadership of Catherine Candee, then under the leadership of Catherine Mitchell, has become a world-class exemplar of digital academic publishing. eScholarship supports the full range of digital scholarship, from working papers to journals to books and much more.
Supporting all of this is a technical infrastructure based on a robust and flexible publishing and searching platform called the eXtensible Text Framework, or XTF. While many other institutions have institutional repositories, they mostly end there. They can accept paper submissions but little else. What eScholarship has accomplished is the construction of a full array of digital publication tools that really are unmatched by anything else I have yet seen. And it’s open source.
So this latest mandate by UC will squarely place eScholarship at the center of the academic and research enterprise at UC, as faculty move to comply with the policy. Even if compliance is not — at least initially — 100 percent, the additional weight of the Academic Senate will surely spur a flood of content into this open access repository. And that’s a win for everybody.