Scholarly Communication
Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII)
The goal of a new pilot, sponsored by the Vice Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian, is to advance the impact of UC Berkeley research by subsidizing Berkeley faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication. Find out how to apply for funds at the BRII website.
Scholarly communication is the system by which information is created (by scholars), distributed (by publishers), and disseminated, preserved, and organized (by libraries). The soaring cost of published information has put this system at risk.
Scholarly Communication at Risk
- Scholars: As scholars and researchers, you create scholarly information: You write articles. You edit journals. You provide quality control in the form of peer review. You do all of this for free.
- Publishers: Publishers – many of them multi-billion dollar, global corporations – sell this information back to the academy at increasingly unjustifiable prices. At the same time, the number of scholarly monographs produced continues to grow.
- Libraries: As journal prices continue to rise and as monograph production grows, university budgets cannot keep up. Even the greatest libraries are collecting a declining percentage of published scholarly output.
The fundamental mission of the University as stated in the Academic Personnel Manual (APM) is to "discover knowledge and to disseminate it" to colleagues, students, and society at large. The crisis in scholarly communication threatens not only to reduce your access to scholarly material but also limits the dissemination of your scholarly output. As stated in Resolution I by the UC Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee, "Scholarly communication is in a state of crisis that threatens to compromise the University of California's core mission."
New Technology
The Internet gives publishers new opportunities for generating revenue. Now, publishers can charge licensing fees for their online content. In other words, instead of paying one-time fees to own online resources, libraries often "rent" them. At the same time, the Internet has the potential to give you, as an author, more control over how your work is disseminated. Rather than relying on a publisher to distribute your work, you can post your own research findings on eScholarship. This makes your work available not just to those who happen to be affiliated with institutions that subscribe to the journal but to anyone, anywhere with access to the Internet.
The goal of this website is:
- To share information about scholarly communication and describe how the crisis affects you, the Berkeley faculty.
- To give you information on what you can do to support changes in the current system and how to take advantage of new technologies.
- To invite you to tell us what you think.
