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.”
"Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be: easy to use, get and pass around, editable so instructors can customize content, cross-platform compatible, printable, and accessible so they work with adaptive technology."
