Designing Incentives and Support

Assertion: Incentives and support can be designed to assist scholars to shift their publishing behavior:

• from high-profit commercial journals to more sustainable models
• from printed monographs to digital, print-on-demand online works
• from "smallest publishable unit" to complete research report
• by placing research into open access repositories

Question: What support and incentives (monetary, time, staffing, training, etc.) could the university offer to Berkeley authors and editors to facilitate this change?

A Few Background Facts:

Subventions are not uncommon¹:
For 1st publications:

• UT-Austin distributes $30,000/yr using campus bookstore profits. Authors may publish with any academic press and need not be tenured to apply.
• Yale provides up to $5,000 to younger faculty members in the humanities.
• Ohio State approves subsidies up to $2,000, funded equally by departments and academic divisions. Others include the University of Iowa, North Carolina State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For use of alternatives:

• UNC VC for Research created a subsidy for open access publication fees

The UC Libraries have arranged memberships that assist with publication in open access journals²

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¹ Presses Seek Fiscal Relief in Subsidies for Authors: Universities would provide money to underwrite their professors' books. Chronicle of Higher Education. August 13, 2004.
² Maintained at the UC Office of Scholarly Communication.