From Peter Suber'sblog Innovations at the U of California The University of California is the SPARC Innovator for July 2006. From the SPARC announcement: The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) launched the UC Office of Scholarly Communication in 2004 to support and coordinate a plethora of diverse, cutting-edge initiatives that help scholars and researchers regain control of their work, while exploring innovative means of scholarly communication. This simple organizational act represented the culmination of work conducted over a ten-year period by UC administrators, faculty, and librarians who took a focused, activist stance to change the status quo. In the late 1990s, for example, UC initiated the California Digital Library and as part of it, the eScholarship repository. Since then it has moved from strength to strength. For example, it has developed groundbreaking contracts with publishers which have helped to curtail hyperinflation in the price of online journal subscriptions; developed guidance for faculty on ways to manage intellectual property and retain copyright; developed, through the academic faculty senate, a series of white papers advocating shifts in scholarly communication; established innovative new scholarly publishing programs and forged an electronic publishing alliance between the CDL and the University of California Press; and created a Scholarly Communication Officers group comprising senior librarians at each of the 10 UC branches to harmonize local and system-wide planning and action. For its extraordinarily effective institution-wide vision and efforts to move scholarly communication forward for the benefit of its faculty, students, and the public, SPARC has named UC a SPARC Innovator.... According to John Ober, Director of Policy, Planning, and Outreach co-director - with Catherine Candee - of UC's Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), the [California Digital Library or CDL] "was built from a set of principles that explicitly included the need to influence the marketplace for scholarly content to become more sustainable."... UC's faculty have taken an even stronger position with regard to copyright management. In 2006, the Faculty Senate endorsed a proposal recommending to the President that the University's copyright policy be amended to enable open access to UC research.... Friends: Should not Indian universities (and research labs) follow the example of the University of California and embrace open access wholeheartedly? Should not our academics work towards changing the copyright law to protect their own interests? Why do we have to continue to give away copyright to work done by us (and knowledge that we create) with taxpayers' money to companies publishing professional journals? Why do we continue to sign on the dotted line of the printed copyright agreement form provided by journals andwhy cannot we negotiate with the journal publishers to reword the copyright agreement to suit our needs? Best wishes. Arun [Subbuiah Arunachalam] From Peter Suber'sblog     Innovations at the U of California The http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/ University of California is the http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/ SPARC Innovator for July 2006. From the SPARC http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/uc.html announcement : The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) launched the UC Office of Scholarly Communication in 2004 to support and coordinate a plethora of diverse, cutting-edge initiatives that help scholars and researchers regain control of their work, while exploring innovative means of scholarly communication. This simple organizational act represented the culmination of work conducted over a ten-year period by UC administrators, faculty, and librarians who took a focused, activist stance to change the status quo. In the late 1990s, for example, UC initiated the California Digital Library and as part of it, the eScholarship repository. Since then it has moved from strength to strength. For example, it has developed groundbreaking contracts with publishers which have helped to curtail hyperinflation in the price of online journal subscriptions; developed guidance for faculty on ways to manage intellectual property and retain copyright; developed, through the academic faculty senate, a series of white papers advocating shifts in scholarly communication; established innovative new scholarly publishing programs and forged an electronic publishing alliance between the CDL and the University of California Press; and created a Scholarly Communication Officers group comprising senior librarians at each of the 10 UC branches to harmonize local and system-wide planning and action. For its extraordinarily effective institution-wide vision and efforts to move scholarly communication forward for the benefit of its faculty, students, and the public, SPARC has named UC a SPARC Innovator.... According to John Ober, Director of Policy, Planning, and Outreach co-director – with Catherine Candee – of UC’s Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), the [California Digital Library or CDL] “was built from a set of principles that explicitly included the need to influence the marketplace for scholarly content to become more sustainable.”... UC’s faculty have taken an even stronger position with regard to copyright management. In 2006, the Faculty Senate endorsed a proposal recommending to the President that the University’s copyright policy be amended to enable open access to UC research....   Friends:   Should not Indian universities (and research labs) follow the example of the University of California and embrace open access wholeheartedly? Should not our academics work towards changing the copyright law to protect their own interests? Why do we have to continue to give away copyright to work done by us (and knowledge that we create) with taxpayers' money to companies publishing professional journals? Why do we continue to sign on the dotted line of the printed copyright agreement form provided by journals andwhy cannot we negotiate with the journal publishers to reword the copyright agreement to suit our needs?   Best wishes.   Arun [Subbuiah Arunachalam]