From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2012 23:44:58 -0500

This press release emphasizes "scientific articles," but the policy
itself is not limited to articles in the sciences but to all faculty
articles of any kind.

The policy refers to the "final version" of the article, but provides
no definition of what that term means.  So, is this a Green OA
approach, or not?

It would be helpful if such policies and their accompanying press
releases were written with greater clarity.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: "Taylor, Anneliese" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 00:32:57 +0000
>
> University of California, San Francisco Press Release
> May 23, 2012
>
>
> UCSF IMPLEMENTS POLICY TO MAKE RESEARCH PAPERS FREELY ACCESSIBLE TO PUBLIC
>
> Health Sciences Campus Becomes Largest in Nation to Adopt Open-access Policy
>
> The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of
> current and future scientific articles freely available to the public,
> helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and
> scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.
>
> The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest
> scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy
> and among the first public universities to do so.
>
> "Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone
> who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general
> public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals," said
> Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee
> on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative
> at UCSF. "The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers
> to scientific research," he said. "By opening the currently closed
> system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the
> taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in
> research."
>
> UCSF is the nation's largest public recipient of funding from the
> National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year,
> valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads
> to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded,
> peer-reviewed scientific journals, but the majority of those papers
> are only available to subscribers who pay ever-increasing fees to the
> journals. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends
> close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals.
>
> Such restrictions and costs have been cited among the obstacles in
> translating scientific advances from laboratory research into improved
> clinical care.
>
> The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles
> freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and
> thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google
> Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national
> open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or
> published as open-access publications. They will then be available to
> be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.
>
> Schneider said hurdles do remain, including convincing commercial
> publishers to modify their exclusive publication contracts to
> accommodate such a policy. Some publishers already have demonstrated
> their willingness to do so, he said, but others, especially premier
> journals, have been less inclined to allow the system to change.
>
> Under terms negotiated with the NIH, a major proponent of open access,
> some of the premier journals only allow open access in PubMed Central
> one year after publication; prior to that only the titles and
> summaries of articles are freely available.  How such journals will
> handle the UCSF policy remains to be seen, Schneider said.
>
> The UCSF policy gives the university a nonexclusive license to
> distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in
> scientific or medical journals. Researchers are able to "opt out" if
> they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher
> is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy.  "The hope," said
> Schneider, "is that faculty will think twice about where they publish,
> and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the
> policy."
>
> Full press release:
> http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/05/12056/ucsf-implements-policy-make-research-papers-freely-accessible-public
>
> Full text of policy and supporting documents
> http://senate.ucsf.edu/2011-2012/j-lib-openaccess.html
>
> Jennifer O'Brien Interim Executive Director/News
> Source: Kristen Bole (415) 502-6397 (NEWS)
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Web: www.ucsf.edu
> Twitter: @KristenBole
>
> Anneliese Taylor
> Head of Collection Management
> University of California, San Francisco Library
> San Francisco, CA 94143-0840
> [log in to unmask]