RE: Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, ACADEMIC SENATE

BERKELEY

• DAVIS • IRVINE • LOS ANGELES • MERCED • RIVERSIDE • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ

Robert C. May Chair of the Assembly of the Academic Senate

Telephone: (510) 987-0711 Faculty Representative to the Regents

Email: robert.may@ucop.edu

University of California

1111 Franklin Street, 12th Floor

Oakland, California 94607-5200

June 3, 2019

JANET NAPOLITANO, PRESIDENT

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

RE: Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication

Dear Janet,

At its May 22, 2019 meeting, the Academic Council endorsed unanimously (with one

abstention) the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC)’s

Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication. The Principles

are an aspirational document outlining an ideal future state of scholarly publishing that gives

faculty control over publications and enables the broad dissemination of scholarship. The

Declaration clarifies the faculty’s concerns about the current financially unsustainable

subscription model, which extracts money from the University and provides large profit

margins for commercial publishers earned off of the unpaid labor of faculty authors.

UCOLASC believes that the 18 Principles outlined in the Declaration can help transform the

system of scholarly communication to be more open, fair, transparent, and sustainable. The

Principles have already stimulated debate, inspired other institutions around the world,

increased UC’s visibility and global leadership in the open access movement, and helped guide

the UC Publisher Negotiating Team in its pursuit of the multi-payer “Publish and Read” model

with commercial publishers.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have additional questions.

Sincerely,

Robert C. May, Chair

Academic Council

cc: UCOLASC Chair Schneider

Academic Council

Senate Directors

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A

BERKELEY • DAVIS • IRVINE • LOS ANGELES • MERCED • RIVERSIDE • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ

UNIVERSITY COMMITTEE ON LIBRARY AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION Assembly of the Academic Senate

Richard A. Schneider, Chair 1111 Franklin Street, 12

Floor

[email protected]du Oakland, CA 94607-5200

13 May 2019

ROBERT MAY, CHAIR

ACADEMIC COUNCIL

Re: Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication

Dear Robert,

On behalf of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), I

am writing to inform you that last year UCOLASC strongly and unanimously endorsed (12-0) a

set of 18 principles that we propose be taken into account when the University of California

engages in journal license negotiations with commercial publishers. These principles were

developed by UCOLASC with input from various stakeholders across the University and at other

like-minded academic institutions. Since then, the UCOLASC Principles have been unanimously

endorsed by seven Senate committees (UCAP, UCAF, UCOPR, UCFW, UCACC, CCGA, and

UCPB). These Principles have also motivated other institutions around the world to take action,

and they have helped maintain UC’s visibility and global leadership in the open access movement.

As described in the enclosed cover letter, UCOLASC firmly believes that if adopted, these

principles have great potential to transform the system of scholarly communication from one that

remains closed and unaffordable, to one that is more open, fair, transparent, and sustainable. We

believe that these principles support the mission of UC to serve the public good by “providing

long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new

knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.”

Action item: UCOLASC respectfully requests that Academic Council consider endorsing these

18 principles on behalf of all Academic Senate faculty. Such an endorsement would 1) signal our

collective commitment to advance the public mission of UC; 2) accelerate our ongoing effort to

make the products of UC scholarship as freely and widely available as possible through open

access; and 3) leverage faculty backing to ensure that UC spends taxpayer money in the most

ethically, morally, and socially-responsible way when entering into agreements with publishers.

If you have any questions or require additional information, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Richard A. Schneider, Chair

UCOLASC

13 April 2018

BERKELEY • DAVIS • IRVINE • LOS ANGELES • MERCED • RIVERSIDE • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ

UNIVERSITY COMMITTEE ON LIBRARY AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Assembly of the Academic Senate, University of California

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A

Dear Colleagues,

For well over a decade the University of California has been deeply engaged in leading the effort to

transform scholarly communication from a closed subscription-based publishing system to one

where our work can be freely accessible to all. In 2005, UC Santa Cruz faculty passed a resolution

supporting open access (OA), which prompted a proposed UC systemwide policy in 2007. Although

these initial efforts did not garner enough backing, they laid the groundwork for other institutions to

follow suit and formed the basis of subsequent OA policies at UC San Francisco in 2012, the

systemwide Academic Senate in 2013, and the UC Office of the President in 2015. Because of

these policies, UC authors can now make the 50,000 articles they publish every year immediately

accessible in our UC institutional OA repository. Doing so is one step toward advancing our mission

of disseminating our scholarship as widely as possible and making our many research outputs freely

available to everyone, especially to the taxpayers who underwrite our academic enterprise.

Despite our longstanding commitment to OA, the publishing system has yet to transform into one

that is truly open and economically sustainable. In fact, less than 15% of peer-reviewed articles are

published in journals that are fully OA, the vast majority of work resides behind a subscription

paywall, and commercial publishers continue to extract billions of dollars annually out of the current

system with profit margins among the greatest of any industry. Meanwhile, our library budgets keep

shrinking and we cannot afford the exorbitant price increases that publishers relentlessly levy. UC

spends over $34 million per year for shared access to scholarly journals. Our actual payment is at

least $17 million higher if we include separate campus licenses, personal subscriptions, article

processing charges (APCs), page charges, and pay-per-view downloads. Yet even if we had

unlimited budgets and could bear all of the expenses imposed by profiteering publishers, there

would still remain compelling reasons to transform the current system of scholarly communication.

Historically our main focus when licensing journals and other resources has been to contain rising

costs, expand our portfolio of online materials, and fight restrictive terms. But now we find ourselves

trapped in paying to sustain a broken system that we have been outspokenly trying to change. With

this in mind, our faculty, our librarians, and our administrators have begun to speak with one voice

and insist that we as an institution put our money where our mouth is. We want UC expenditures to

be congruent with our broader and longer-term OA objectives, and be aimed at upending the status

quo. Since our salaries and our subscription budgets come directly from state funds, we feel we

have a duty to set clear terms and conditions that ensure such taxpayer money gets spent in the

most ethically, morally, and socially-responsible way, and expressly for the greater good.

To this end, we as faculty representatives of our University, assert the rights of authors and affiliated

stakeholders—who labor to produce works of knowledge and art of value to society—to own,

control, and freely disseminate for the benefit of the public, the products of their efforts, including

publications, data, metadata, and related research outputs. Backed by faculty resolve, we propose

the following 18 principles to make scholarly communication more open, fair, transparent, and

sustainable when applied as levers by UC during license negotiations with journal publishers.

Sincerely,

Richard A. Schneider

Chair, UCOLASC

13 April 2018

BERKELEY • DAVIS • IRVINE • LOS ANGELES • MERCED • RIVERSIDE • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ

UNIVERSITY COMMITTEE ON LIBRARY AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Assembly of the Academic Senate, University of California

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A

DECLARATION OF RIGHTS AND PRINCIPLES TO TRANSFORM SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

To align our institutional policies and practices toward the goal of replacing subscription-based

publishing with open access (OA), we propose that the University of California assert the

following rights and principles when negotiating with publishers during journal license renewals:

1. No copyright transfers. Our authors shall be allowed to retain copyright in their work and

grant a Creative Commons Attribution license of their choosing.

2. No restrictions on preprints. Our authors shall have the right to submit for publication work

they have previously made available as preprints.

3. No waivers of OA Policy. Publishers shall not require our authors to provide waivers of our

Institutional OA Policy as a condition for publishing our work.

4. No delays to sharing. Publishers shall make work by our authors immediately available for

harvest or via automatic deposit into our Institutional OA repository or another public archive.

5. No limitations on author reuse. Our authors shall have the right to reuse figures, tables,

data, and text from their published work without permission or payment.

6. No impediments to rights reversion. Publishers shall provide a simple process for our

authors to regain copyright in their previously published work.

7. No curtailment of copyright exceptions. Licenses shall not restrict, and should instead

expressly protect, the rights of authors, institutions, and the public to reuse excerpts of

published work consistent with legal exceptions and limitations on copyright such as fair use.

8. No barriers to data availability. Our authors shall have the right to make all of their data,

figures, and other supporting materials from their published work publicly available.

9. No constraints on content mining. Publishers shall make licensed materials open,

accessible, and machine-readable for text and data mining by our researchers, at no

additional cost and under terms that allow retention and reuse of results.

10. No closed metadata. Publishers shall make bibliographic records, usage metrics, and

citation data for our authors freely available, easy to parse, and machine-readable.

11. No free labor. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on peer review and editorial

contributions by our authors in support of journals, and such contributions shall be taken into

account when determining the cost of our subscriptions or OA fees for our authors.

12. No long-term subscriptions. Publishers shall provide our Institution with plans and timelines

for transitioning their subscription journals to OA.

13. No permanent paywalls. Our Institution shall receive perpetual access for previously

licensed content and back files shall be made freely available once a journal transitions to OA.

14. No double payments. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on hybrid OA

payments from our authors and such payments shall reduce the cost of our subscriptions.

15. No hidden profits. Publishers shall use transparent pricing for the services they provide our

authors when levying article processing charges and other fees associated with publishing.

16. No deals without OA offsets. Our Institution shall only enter into publishing agreements that

include offsets for OA publishing by our authors.

17. No new paywalls for our work. Work by our authors shall be made OA on the publisher’s

website as part of subscription terms for new journals.

18. No non-disclosure agreements. Publisher agreements with our Institution shall be

transparent and shall not contain terms that prevent the sharing of their contents.

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A

BERKELEY • DAVIS • IRVINE • LOS ANGELES • MERCED • RIVERSIDE • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ

UNIVERSITY COMMITTEE ON LIBRARY AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION Assembly of the Academic Senate

Richard A. Schneider, Chair 1111 Franklin Street, 12

Floor

rich.schneider@ucsf.edu Oakland, CA 94607-5200

25 April 2018

Re: Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC),

we are writing to report that UCOLASC has strongly and unanimously endorsed (12-0) a set of

18 principles that we propose be taken into account when the University of California engages in

its upcoming and future journal license negotiations with commercial publishers. These

principles were developed by UCOLASC during the course of the year with input from various

stakeholders across the University and at other like-minded academic institutions.

As described in the enclosed cover letter, UCOLASC firmly believes that if adopted, these

principles have great potential to transform the system of scholarly communication from one that

remains closed and unaffordable, to one that is more open, fair, transparent, and sustainable.

We believe that these principles support the mission of UC to serve the public good by

“providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering

new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.”

UCOLASC devised and endorsed these 18 principles 1) to signal our collective commitment to

advance the public mission of UC; 2) to accelerate our ongoing effort to make the products of

UC research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible through open access;

and 3) to leverage faculty backing to ensure that UC spends taxpayer money in the most

ethically, morally, and socially-responsible way when entering into agreements with publishers.

In closing, while publishers continue to go to great lengths to restrict the rights and academic

freedom of authors, we believe that this proposal can help restore the balance of power and

give faculty more control over the fruits of their labor. Based on these principles, our expectation

is that UC will push for terms and conditions in publisher agreements that are transformative

and closely aligned with our short- and long-term goals for scholarly communication.

Sincerely,

Richard A. Schneider, Chair

Dennis Ventry, Vice Chair

Geoffrey Koziol, UC Berkeley

Kathryn Olmsted, UC Davis

Amelia Regan, UC Irvine

Eric Sobel, UC Los Angeles

Karl Ryavec, UC Merced

Jiayu Liao, UC Riverside

Eric Bakovic, UC San Diego

Diana Laird, UC San Francisco

John Du Bois, UC Santa Barbara

Jennifer Horne, UC Santa Cruz