UpcPathways to Open Access: The University of California’s Journey(s) Toward an Open and Equitable Model for Knowledge Sharing – Open & Equitable Scholarship in the Liberal Arts Lecture Series

September 30th, 2021

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. (EST) via Zoom

Hosted by Jill Livingston, Associate University Librarian at Wesleyan University

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

The University of California has been making news lately with the “transformative agreements” it is striking with commercial publishers to make UC-authored research articles available via open access. For some, this work marks a significant achievement in the decades-long quest to “flip” the scholarly communications market away from gated (subscription) content and toward an open model that ensures global access to scholarly publications. For others, these agreements fall short by failing to address a number of equity issues that are bound up with resourcing, publisher size/clout, and the question of who gets to publish in the first place.

In this talk, Dr. Mitchell will argue that many recent conversations about transformative agreements have been too polarized and too polarizing–that, in fact, there is no single intervention that will solve all the problems of access and equity that grip academia, and we are all better served to think in terms of collective and complementary efforts, rather than silver bullets. In discussing UC’s library publishing program and open access policies, as well as their digital special collections and digitization projects, Dr. Mitchell will describe the ways in which each of these services encounters and tackles its own problems of access, equity, and resourcing–and how they all, together with the work of the licensing division, represent UC’s multiple pathways toward open and equitable knowledge sharing..

Catherine Mitchell, PhD, is the Director of Publishing, Archives, and Digitization at the California Digital Library, University of California. This program provides the University of California research community with innovative open access publishing and distribution solutions, and aggregates world-class digital collections from libraries, archives, and museums throughout the State of California, serving an array of end users including researchers, scholars, students, and the general public. Program services include eScholarship (UC’s Open Access IR/Publishing platform, with 85+ journals), Calisphere (an open gateway to over two million digitized historical images, texts and recordings), and the Google Books/HathiTrust projects. Catherine is also Operations Director of UC’s Office of Scholarly Communication, served on the Library Publishing Coalition’s Advisory Board for six years (two years as President), and is currently Treasurer of the Crossref Board of Directors.