November 2005

 

Special Committee on Scholarly Communications

The Senate convened the Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC) in 2004 to address dysfunctions in the area of scholarly communication that diminished access to and impact of scholarship, impeded innovations in the dissemination of scholarship, and led to decades of hyper-inflated prices.

Developing and maintaining healthy scholarly communication systems is critical to the mission of the University of California. UC scholars and researchers depend upon such systems to not only communicate the results of their research and scholarly inquiry, but also to advance the body of scholarly knowledge within their fields and disciplines. However, many in the academic community are concerned about the current poor health of scholarly communication; with dysfunctions that resulted in decades of hyper-inflated prices for publications, reduced the access to and impact of scholarship, and impeded innovations in the dissemination of scholarship.

As demonstrated by the Academic Senate’s convening in 2004 of a Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC), the UC Faculty is committed to promoting effective scholarly communication, to articulating and assuming its own role in the creation of healthy scholarly communication systems, and to encouraging its partners to assume a similar commitment.

In pursuit of its charge, the SCSC is developing a series of white papers for consideration by the Council and Senate in late 2005. These papers speak to a number of audiences that include university faculty (including promotion and tenure committees), publishers of journals and books, and scholarly societies. They recommend a series of actions that seek to support the development of a more sustainable future for the dissemination of new scholarly knowledge:

1. maintenance and advancement of judicious and critical peer review as the fundamental basis for assessing and communicating the quality of scholarship;
2. dissemination of new knowledge to the widest possible appropriate audience, with the fewest barriers of access for that audience;
3. economic balance and sustainability for all participants;
4. unfettered reuse of scholarship by the scholars and within the academic enterprise from which it originates;
5. accommodation of disciplinary differences while serving equally across all scholarly disciplines and across all campuses of the University;
6. appropriate use of current and future technology in support of all of these characteristics.