The Facts: Alternatives for Scholarly Communication

New alternatives for the dissemination of research and scholarship may halt the trend that decreases scholars' access to essential research resources. If utilized, these innovations will yield new benefits to scholars, increase the breadth of dissemination, and more fully support the growth of knowledge.

See sections below:

The Trends
What You Can Do
More Information

The Trends

Access to scholarly resources is declining. Rapidly escalating costs of journals from scholarly publishers — especially commercial science, technology, and medical journals — are limiting the University’s ability to maintain, much less increase the breadth and depth of the scholarly materials it makes available through its libraries. These rising costs are unsustainable for library budgets. See more about the economics of scholarly publishing.

Internet technologies are creating new opportunities: While technology has not substantially decreased the cost of producing and reviewing scholarship, it has created efficiencies in those processes. Further, technology allows much greater dissemination at nearly zero marginal cost for additional readers. Technology also enables quicker publication, access to supplementary or source materials, new forms of commentary and dialogue, and new ways to discover and aggregate scholarly resources.

Alternatives to traditional publishing are being thoroughly tested: Several models for disseminating scholarship have emerged and are being deployed. The primary advantage of alternative forms of publishing is that they provide unrestricted (free) access to all potential readers, as compared to traditional subscription or purchase-based publications.

Most alternative forms of publishing also:

Include peer-review or other quality control.
Are available quickly or immediately after creation.
Are managed for long-term availability.
Are discoverable through traditional indexes or new, community-built services.

The primary alternatives are profiled in this table of the characteristics of scholarly publishing options. Alternatives include:

Open access journals that cover publication costs through alternatives to subscriptions or "toll gates", such as submission fees, publication fees, endowments, and sponsorships. The University of California is an institutional member of two publishers who are experimenting with a business model that charges for publication and makes access free worldwide. UC’s support of the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central provides a reduction of publication fees for UC authors.

Publishers who are experimenting with alternatives. Browse through news and issues to see announcements about experiments from a variety of other publishers, including Oxford University Press, Springer, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Direct deposit of digital research results into online research repositories. Disciplinary communities and institutions have created online repositories for research results. The UC's eScholarship Repository can handle working papers, conference and seminar proceedings, peer-reviewed series and journals, and covers many disciplines. It receives University support through the California Digital Library.

Competitors to commercially published journals. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) exists to foster such competition. View a list of some SPARC-supported journals currently in publication.

Scholars are articulating their needs and expectations: Along with greater access to research, the quality, impact, and long-term care of research results top the list of scholars' concerns. UC organizations are ensuring that the necessary discussions take place about those concerns, and about the relationship of new forms of scholarly communication to faculty advancement and tenure (see reports from the faculty forums). Such dialogues will inform individual faculty decisions as well as choices for University support of innovation in scholarly communication.

What You Can Do

UC faculty wield enormous influence as authors and editors. Here’s what you can do to maximize the reach and impact of your research, reduce access barriers, and retain quality control of your scholarship:

Manage your intellectual property: Your decisions about copyright can increase your freedom and flexibility to use your work for teaching, learning, and research. Instead of signing away all rights to a publisher, you can reserve some or all rights to copy or republish, and transfer only those rights to the publisher that they need to conduct their business.
Use alternative forms of publishing: New modes of scholarly publication include UC’s eScholarship Repository, which provides open-access repositories for research and scholarly output using technologies that accelerate the free dissemination of new findings. In addition, there are now more than 1,000 open access journals that are focused on increasing dissemination and are experimenting with new business models — see the directory of open access journals. UC directly supports two publishers in this domain. UC membership in the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central yields reduced publication fees for UC authors.
Support sustainable scholarly communication: Consider submitting papers to quality journals that have reasonable pricing practices; examine the pricing, copyright, and licensing agreements of any commercially published journal you contribute to; or refuse to review for unreasonably expensive journals or to serve on their editorial boards.

More Information

Budapest Open Access Initiative: A world-wide initiative committed to open-access journals and to self-archiving.
Resources for reference: Includes links to resources from the UC campuses and other organizations addressing issues in scholarly communication.