Scholarly Transformation Advice and Review (STAR) Team Request Form [CONFIDENTIAL – UC ONLY*]

The STAR Team is charged to evaluate and make initial recommendations on UC consortial investment opportunities in potentially transformative scholarly communication initiatives.  UC groups can use the STAR Team request form to request a review of a scholarly communication initiative by the STAR Team. All requests and subsequent evaluations will be kept confidential within the UC system.

A scholarly communication effort can be considered transformative when it is developed principally to:

a) remove or reduce impediments to the flow and availability of knowledge, especially of quality-filtered (peer-reviewed) material; or

b) create a more sustainable set of economic transactions among the stakeholders, especially payments from content consumers and originators to publishers for access to content.

In order to meet UC’s criteria for transformative investment, both of these attributes should ideally be present.  If only one is present, it should be judged to be significant. Examples of scholarly communication initiatives that are potential targets for UC investment through the use of these criteria include, but are not limited to:

  • open access journals or monographs
  • researcher and data identifier services
  • altmetrics services
  • scholarly sharing platforms
  • preprint services
  • data publication
  • hosting services
  • discovery tools

Requests will follow the review process flowchart.

*Please note that access to this page is restricted to members of the University of California community. We ask for your cooperation in protecting the integrity of our evaluation and negotiation process by not sharing this information with anybody outside of the university.