Scholarly Communication & Related Issues

Open Content Alliance
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors.

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity

Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
SPARC is conceived as a partnership project of the Association of Research Libraries to serve its members and the broader higher education and publishing communities and is now international with offices in Europe, China and Australia.

CrossRef
CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency for scholarly and professional publications, harnesses collaboration among publishers to provide the scholarly community with easier access to online research content. CrossRef was established in 2000 as an independent, non-profit membership association, with a mandate to make cross-publisher linking throughout online scholarly literature efficient and reliable using the DOI system.

BioMed Central
BioMed Central's Institutional Membership Program enables institutions to actively support open access in scholarly publishing, and will help ensure the most widespread dissemination of the research published by their scientists. Researchers affiliated with UC will not be charged page or article-processing charges for publishing in BMC publications (the fees are subsidized through the library's institutional membership).

 In March, 2009, President Obama signed the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the NIH Public Access Policy permanent. Previously it was subject to annual renewal.  In 2024, NIH updated the website to NIH Scientific Data Sharing website (https://sharing.nih.gov).

Taxpayer Access

What is "Taxpayer Access"?

Access to scientific and medical publications has lagged behind the wide reach of the Internet into U.S. homes and institutions. Subscription barriers limits U.S. taxpayer access to research that has been paid for with public funds.
Taxpayer access removes these barriers by making the peer-reviewed results of taxpayer-funded research available online, and for no extra charge to the American public.  Public hearings were held in the House of Representatives in Summer 2010 on public access to publicly funded research.

Google's Position

In response to Google's agreement with a number of large libraries in the U.S., the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers filed a class action lawsuit against Google Book Search alleging copyright infringement. (The lawsuit is entitled The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc., Case No. 05 CV 8136 (S.D.N.Y.).)  In October 2008, an agreement was struck between these parties, providing for copyright holders to 'opt out' their works and/or to receive financial compensation for inclusion.  The agreement includes other terms addressing access to the digital files by scholars (both those affiliated with the contributing libraries, and those unaffiliated).

On Friday, November 13, 2009, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers filed an Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) in the copyright infringement litigation concerning the Google Library Project.   The amendments proposed by the parties are designed to address objections made by the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to the original proposed settlement agreement.

Includes an overview of the copyright infringement suit settlement, deadlines for authors to file for exclusion and/or cash settlements, and both online and paper-based mechanisms to file.