[Insight-users] OPEN ACCESS: Berkeley to pay authors’ open-access charges (SPARC)

[Luis Ibanez]

 From the SPARC mailing list
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/articles/memberprofile-berkeley.shtml

This article is the first in a series SPARC will offer to highlight
change on our member campuses. If you're a SPARC member and have a
program to be highlighted here, or would like to recommend a program on
another campus, please contact Jennifer McLennan through jennifer [at]
arl [dot] org.

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It’s one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It’s another
to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it.

That’s what’s happening at the University of California Berkeley. In
January, the university launched the Berkeley Research Impact
Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by the University Librarian and
the Vice Chancellor for Research to cover publication charges for
open-access journals.

Faculty, post-doc and graduate students can apply for up to $3,000 to
cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access publication.
The fund also gives up to $1,500 for the cost of so-called hybrid
publications’ paid access fees, where information is freely available
but the journal limits the right to redistribute. The pilot program will
last 18 months or until the initial $125,000 fund runs out. The hope –
and challenge – is to find a permanent funding source.

The idea behind the fund

“As a library community, if we really wanted to change behavior of
faculty about where they published, we needed to put our money where our
mouth was – not only talking about open access, but help them do it,”
says Beth Weil, a champion of the initiative and head of the bioscience
and natural resources library at Berkeley. In talking with faculty, she
became aware of a wide disparity in funding and saw a need to provide
financial assistance to pay for open-access fees.

The academic publishing world is rapidly changing and it was important
for the campus to experiment with different models, says Tom Leonard,
university librarian at Berkeley and professor in the graduate school of
journalism. On the Berkeley campus, there is a rebellion in the ranks
from scientists who don’t think the community needs to bear these high
publishing costs.

“When we move ahead in scholarly communication, we’ve got to approach it
with an open mind,” says Leonard. “You can’t assume just because there
has been one way of doing this that dominates – it doesn’t mean it will
last.”

Two other U.S. universities have also established funds to pay for
open-access research

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has an annual commitment of
$10,000 and funds maximum awards of $1,000 per article. (To read more
about its Open Access Authors’ Fund established in 2005, click here) At
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, $50,000 in seed money from the
library’s gift fund is available to help authors pay for open-access
journal fees. (For information about its program through the Office of
Scholarly Communication and Publishing, click here). Overseas, the
University of Nottingham and the University of Amsterdam provide funds
for open-access publication.

Berkeley’s initiative attempts to cover closer to full reimbursement for
open-access publishing and partial coverage for options in hybrid journals.

“What Berkeley is doing is a huge boon and boost for the momentum in the
open-access movement,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC.
“Whether you are a supporter or skeptic, how to make Open Access
sustainable has always been talked about in multiple ways. It’s really
exciting to have a concrete example. The university is lending credence
to the idea that dissemination is part and parcel of research.

Setting it up

About a year ago, Berkeley formed a working group that met monthly to
explore setting up a fund for open-access fees. The group didn’t want to
push its own agenda, so it spent a lot of time “shopping the idea
around” to the faculty, including scientists who would be enthusiastic
and others who were skeptics, says Leonard.

“Feedback and really listening to faculty” made the initiative stronger
in the end, says Chuck Eckman, associate university librarian for
collections at Berkeley. For instance, there was a concern that it not
appear as if the university was only endorsing one mode of publishing.
As a result, the working group was careful in its language to say that
the initiative was developed in response to emerging trends in
publishing. The emphasis was on providing a source of options, rather
than saying faculty should choose open access, says Eckman.

Getting the support from the research office early in the process was
pivotal, says Eckman. It was a natural partnership, as the library and
the research office have a shared interest in promoting the wide
dissemination of research. The pilot initiative was launched with
one-time funds of $100,000 from the library collections budget and
$25,000 from the Office of Research.

As a public institution, Berkeley is committed to maximizing the impact
of the research of its faculty for the benefit of society, says Beth
Burnside, vice chancellor for research at Berkeley. Open dissemination
of research results is consistent with this commitment. “With this
program we hope to mitigate the financial costs to faculty for making
their publications available to the public immediately upon publication
while still permitting them to publish in the most competitive
journals,” says Burnside.

Burnside says she hopes the initiative sends a message to campus that
the administration supports faculty efforts to make their research
findings maximally and freely available to the public. As for funding?
“We hope that the program can continue. As you know, we are facing
significant budget cuts so it is difficult to predict whether we can
continue the funding indefinitely,” she says.

How it works

At Berkeley, the library will administer reimbursement fees. Authors can
request funding for an article before it has been accepted or
immediately upon acceptance. The money will be distributed on a
first-come, first-served basis. The greatest opportunities for
open-access publishing will likely be in the biological and physical
sciences, but researchers in the social sciences and humanities are free
to apply as well, says Weil.

So far, the architects of the initiative are pleased with the early
response. Four researchers applied for funding within the first month
and several others have inquired. “People hear about it and say, ‘Wow,
that’s great. I can’t believe we’re doing this.’ We hope it lasts,” says
Eckman.

Patrick O’Grady, assistant professor in environmental sciences, policy
and management, heard about the initiative through an email from the
library. He had an article ready for submission and filled out a simple
application online for $1,500 to cover the cost of public access in
Zootaxa, an international journal for animal taxonomists. Within a day,
he had word it was funded.

O’Grady says he chose the journal with the public access option because
he was anxious to have his research available to other scientists. “I am
a big supporter of Open Access. I think it’s good to have publications
more available and, if they are more accessible, hopefully cited more,”
he says.

While faculty members are responding, it’s still a challenge to spread
the word. Having a dialogue with the campus community before the project
was launched helped create some “buzz” about the initiative, says
Eckman. Still, academics are so busy and entrenched in their work that
it’s difficult to get their attention – even with free money. The first
push was to get information out to deans and department chairs to
forward to faculty. Next, to spark a second round of interest, librarian
liaisons with each department will send notices letting faculty and
graduate students know about the fund.

Keeping it going

This initiative truly is an experiment. “Nobody has an explanation of
how this will work permanently,” says Leonard. “That is the challenge.”

The project will be a success if it generates interest that is broad and
sustained, says Eckman. “Ideally, we’d like to see the program support
junior, mid-career and senior level endorsement,” he says. By getting
stakeholders invested in the initiative, Eckman says he hopes Berkeley
is building a case for why this should be permanently funded.

Weil adds that the goal of the initiative is two-fold: To make Berkeley
research free and have a greater impact. Secondly, to change the
behavior of faculty to embrace Open Access and start to write it the
fees into their grant processes.

Leonard underscores that the traditional way of sharing research is no
longer sufficient. And, if you are a scholar, it is a natural feature of
human nature to want to let everyone know about your discoveries.
“Nobody is trying to hide their light under a bushel,” he says. The push
for Open Access is to encourage new avenues of disseminating information
quickly and broadly to advance knowledge.