Evaluating the Impact of Open Access at Berkeley: Results from the 2015 Survey of Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) Funding Recipients

Samantha Teplitzky is Earth and Physical Sciences Librarian in the Physics-Astronomy Library and Margaret Phillips is Social Sciences Librarian & BRII Coordinator in the Education/Psychology Library at the University of California, Berkeley; e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]. © 2016 Samantha Teplitzky and Margaret Phillips, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) was one of the first campus-based open access (OA) funds to be established in North America and one of the most active, distributing more than $244,000 to support University of California (UC) Berkeley authors. In April 2015, we conducted a qualitative study of 138 individuals who had received BRII funding to survey their opinions about the benefits and funding of open access. Most respondents believe their articles had a greater impact as open access, expect to tap multiple sources to fund open access fees, and support the UC Open Access Policy and its goal of making research public and accessible. Results of the survey and a discussion of their impact on the BRII program follow.