Recent books published open access by UC Berkeley authors with support from the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

UC Berkeley Library continues to support a variety of ways our authors can participate in open access (OA) publishing to contribute to UC’s research and teaching mission. This mission includes the practice of “transmitting advanced knowledge” by helping faculty, researchers, and students create and share their scholarship with peers, and the world.

While the system of scholarly publishing includes traditional publications such as peer-reviewed academic articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and more, read on below for some updates on how UC Berkeley Library—and the broader University of California system—is supporting authors in publishing open access books.

While many UC authors create academic journal articles as an output of their research, others focus on producing a scholarly book. Book authors can realize a variety of benefits with open access publishing, including increasing the reach of their scholarship, building relationships within their academic community, garnering more citations, making their scholarly books more affordable for students, improving accessibility for print-disabled users, and more.

UC Berkeley is supporting authors who wish to publish their books open access. The library provides funding assistance and access to publishing platforms and tools for UCB authors to make their books OA.

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is a program to foster broad public access to the work of UCB scholars by encouraging the Berkeley community to take advantage of open access publishing opportunities—including books and journal articles. BRII is the local open access fund that helps defray the costs associated with publishing open access books and research articles. For books, BRII can contribute up to $10,000 per book for it to be published open access. Below are recent UCB-authored books published with the assistance of BRII.

• Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, by Nina Beguš

• Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City, by Julia H Fawcett

• The Values of the Vernacular: Essays in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures in Dialogue with Simon Gaunt, edited by Henry Ravenhall, Hannah Morcos, Maria Teresa Rachetta, Natasha Romanova, Simone Ventura

• Understanding Child Welfare, by Jill Duerr Berrick, Richard P. Barth, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Antonio R. Garcia, Johanna K.P. Greeson, John Gyourko, and Brett Drake

Since 2021, the UC Berkeley Library has had an institutional open access book agreement with Springer Nature. The partnership provides open access funding to UC Berkeley affiliated authors who have books accepted for publication in Springer, Palgrave, and Apress imprints. This means that these authors can publish their books open access at no direct cost to them. The agreement covers all disciplines published by Springer. All the books are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for free access and downloading.

The UC Berkeley Library hosts an instance of Pressbooks (https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/), an online platform through which the UC Berkeley community can create open access books, open educational resources (OER), and other types of digital scholarship.

To learn more about how to create and publish your own eBooks on Pressbooks, join our upcoming demo and workshop on February 19, 2026. RSVP

If you’re a UC Berkeley community member and interested to learn more about how you can create and publish an open access book, visit our website or send an email to schol-comm@berkeley.edu.