1. Springer Open Choice Pilot for UC Authors

In January, UC and Springer signed a ground-breaking agreement in which UC-authored articles accepted in most of the 1700 Springer journals will be published using Springer Open Choice, which brings with it full and immediate access to all readers. This means that UC authors will pay no additional publication fees in order for their articles to be immediately and fully open to all. Under this agreement, articles will be published under a license in which authors retain the right to distribute and re-use their articles freely.

To invoke the Open Choice option, the corresponding or submitting author simply selects a UC campus affiliation from the drop-down menu that appears on the acceptance screens that he or she completes once the article has been accepted for publication. A message on the acceptance screen will indicate that the Open Choice option is being made available to them at no charge through an arrangement with the University of California Libraries.

The UC-Springer agreement is the first large-scale open access experiment of its type undertaken with a major commercial publisher in North America. In 2008, some 1500 journal articles by UC-affiliated authors were published in Springer journals.

2. Springer Ebooks 2005-2009

In collaboration with the other UC campuses, we recently purchased over 20,000 ebooks published by Springer from 2005-2009. This purchase builds on our existing access to Springer book series - including Lecture Notes in Computer Science and Lecture Notes in Mathematics - to greatly expand our ebook collections. Each book chapter is available as a PDF file without digital rights management (DRM). These files can be downloaded, printed, and even transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Eventually, these ebooks will be linked from our catalogs and UC-eLinks. In the meantime, you can search or browse them directly at SpringerLink.

Books are available in all science subject areas, including Mathematics and Statistics. If you have any questions, please contact Brian Quigley at bquigley@library.berkeley.edu.