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Look around the next time you’re sat on a crowded city bus during commuting hours. Most people’s headphones are now plugged into their phones. If by some chance they’re not listening to music then they’re reading the paper, a book, checking twitter, posing on facebook, writing an email, updating their diary or taking a photo and sticking a vintage filter on it while on their phone, or tablet, or e-reader. And they probably are listening to music while doing all the above.

For the past two years, Catherine Mitchell, Director, Publishing, California Digital Library, has been involved in an effort to coordinate the services of the library and University Press in order to better support and manage the University of California’s scholarly output. The goal of the initiative—the University as Publisher—is to help the university reclaim its core intellectual asset (i.e., the knowledge it produces) and assert itself more powerfully in the marketplace of scholarly communication. In the process, the university shores up its values, and its value. “Despite the daunting complexity of the task, universities must take responsibility for managing their own scholarly output or risk losing control of that core intellectual capital,” she says. “If we don’t, someone else will. And it won’t be pretty. We’re talking about our institutions’ major asset. “If we miss the boat on this, we hand off opportunities to partner with our faculty around issues of intellectual property, curation and preservation standards, and transformative models of scholarly communication. We simply become the ‘buyer.’ And, we risk getting locked into untenable licensing agreements in order to gain or regain access to the very research that our own faculty are producing.”