On March 12th, CUCFA sent the following letter to Susan Carlson, Vice Provost for Academic Personnel and Programs.
Dear Vice Provost Carlson,
The Council of UC Faculty Associations Board (CUCFA) is writing with an urgent request to extend the period allowed for faculty and students to comment on the proposed system-wide Open Access Dissertation Policy.
We are aware that this comment period has already been extended from February 28 to March 14, but, as indicated in the letter that our affiliate UCBFA (UC Berkeley Faculty Association) sent to UCOP on March 6th, CUCFA believes that the policy’s announcement was ill-timed and the period for comment is too short to give the appropriate campus agencies and graduate student associations time to study the implications of this policy. Please consider postponing the deadline for comments at least through April 2nd.
CUCFA also wishes to endorse and support the concerns expressed by UCBFA in its letter with some key aspects of the current proposal. We are concerned in particular with the “dangerously flawed” embargo provision; with the potentially inappropriate and undermining “extension of Open Policy ideals” from published to unpublished work, and with the apparent subordination of the “institutional responsibility” of the university towards graduate students to cost-saving criteria. We would like to emphasize that this policy is a significant change and that it may threaten the publishing careers of graduate students in several ways. Faculty, graduate students and library staff on each of the campuses need more time to discuss these and other concerns in order to make appropriate proposals to remedy the current flaws of the policy.
Lastly, CUCFA requests that, quite aside from the modifications that will be made to the text of the policy, its application be not made mandatory but optional for all PhD dissertation students, as it is already the case for UCSB. Given the impossibility of finding a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy, and the many variables that make some fields of inquiry legitimately more concerned than other with any open access policy, it is imperative that the principle regulating any system-wide policy be one of authors’ right to opt in or out.
We look forward to hearing that you have accepted our first request to postpone the deadline for comments, and hope you will consider making a public announcement that whatever policy come out of this process it will be optional and not mandatory.
Sincerely,
Claudio Fogu
Co-Vice President for External Relations
Council of UC Faculty Associations and
Associate Professor of Italian Studies, UC Santa Barbara