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Reclaiming the Scientific Record

The costs of existing commercially published biomedical journals are making it increasingly difficult to provide faculty and students with reasonable access to the growing knowledge base of science. As a response to this dilemma, the University of Southern California has joined the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and is a participant in its Create Change program. This page briefly describes that program and provides links to further resources for members of the USC community interested in fostering new models of scientific communication

CREATE CHANGE has as its core goal to make scholarly research as accessible as possible to scholars all over the world, to their students, and to others who might derive value from it.

We believe this goal can be achieved by the following strategies:

Shifting control of scholarly publication away from commercial publishers and back to scholars.

Influencing scholarly publishers to embrace as their first goal the widest possible dissemination of scholarly information and to abide by pricing policies and practices that are friendly to scholars and libraries.

Creating alternatives to commercial scholarly publications, both competitive alternative journals in more affordable electronic formats and programs that make scholarly research more directly available to scholars.

Fostering changes in the faculty peer review system that will promote greater availability of scholarly research: these changes might include both movement away from quantity and toward acknowledgment of electronic publication as a means of communicating research.

USC health sciences faculty members are encouraged to inform themselves about these issues and to consider ways in which they can take appropriate action. This page will be updated regularly with news and additional resource links as they become available.

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