Springing Forward: An End-of-Semester Update from the Office of Scholarly Communication Services – UC Berkeley Library Update

"Happy May, everyone! Now that the spring semester has drawn to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past few months and look ahead to the summer and fall. It’s been a busy time for the Office of Scholarly Communication Services. Here are some highlights. Maria Gould (that’s me!) joined the Office of Scholarly Communication Services in January as the new Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian. Hello, all! We launched openbooks.berkeley.edu, an exciting new platform – and the first of its kind in the US – to provide self-publishing services to the entire UC Berkeley campus for creation of online textbooks and other digital projects. We released the Pathways to OA toolkit in collaboration with fellow UC libraries to analyze approaches and strategies toward achieving a large-scale transition to a more open and sustainable scholarly publishing system. To enable other institutions to make similar decisions responsive to their own needs, we’re chairing a working forum on the Berkeley campus in October to collaborate with North American libraries in transforming the scholarly publishing system. We wrapped up the second semester of a multifaceted pilot program to make textbooks and other course materials more affordable for students. Stay tuned for our forthcoming report detailing the extensive student savings to date! We are pleased to announce that we’ll be running these services again in Fall 2018. If you’d like to save students money and develop innovative pedagogy, please complete this form to participate. We funded dozens of Open Access publications by UC Berkeley authors through our BRII program. We put on a scholarly publishing symposium for graduate students, and we offered numerous workshops and consultations for groups all around campus on a wide range of topics, including copyright and fair use, text and data mining, scientific publishing, open access, and more. Over the summer and heading into the fall, we’ll be continuing to deepen and further develop our service offerings for campus in the areas of copyright guidance, publishing support, and course content affordability, among others. Thank you for your engagement and support this semester! Please let us know how else we can serve you, and stay tuned for more to come throughout the year."