Whose knowledge is it? UC takes on IP

This talk was co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Center for Research on Computation and Society, and Science Commons.

The commercialization of scholarly publishing has stimulated a crisis that threatens to compromise the very mission of our universities. The crisis reduces access to scholarly materials and limits the dissemination of scholarship. In its search for an economically sustainable means of disseminating the fruits of research, teaching, and learning, the University of California has become host to some of the most successful alternative publishing initiatives in the nation. But in 2007, when faculties at all 10 UC campuses launched an initiative similar to Harvard's FAS resolution-an effort to reshape the management of their copyrights-the effort foundered on issues of implementation. I will discuss lessons learned from the UC experience, the issues at the heart of the open access movement, and what's at stake for our research universities.

About Catherine

Since May 2000, Catherine Candee has been leading Strategic Publishing Initiatives at the University of California. Until very recently, she directed the publishing group at the California Digital Library (CDL) where she launched the eScholarship Program to provide alternative publication services for the UC community. In 2001, she forged a partnership with UC Press Director Lynne Withey, developing innovative publishing ventures that combined the unique talents and abilities of the Press and the CDL. Today the eScholarship Repository, a full-spectrum publishing platform, is home to more than 20,000 scholarly works, reflecting the output of the 200+ UC departments who publish with UC’s eScholarship Services. More than 2,000 UC Press monographs have been digitally published using XTF, an open source text publishing infrastructure developed at the CDL, and a digital critical edition of Mark Twain’s works was launched in October to wide acclaim.

On November 1, Catherine assumed an expanded leadership role supporting scholarly communication at UC. She is responsible for leveraging the capacity of UC-wide educational publishing and broadcast services, represented by the CDL and its eScholarship program, the Continuing Education of the Bar, the Language Learning Consortium, the Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California Press, UC College Prep Online, and UCTV, as part of the university’s effort to forge a sustainable scholarly publishing system.

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