Authors Alliance is pleased to announce that we have received a $500,000 grant from Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—to enhance the ability of institutions to serve the scholarly communications needs of their author communities. The two-year grant will enable us to develop institution-facing materials to complement our existing author-facing resources and to launch a new membership offering for organizations.

In recent years, a growing number of universities have hired scholarly communications staff to train faculty members, graduate students, and other researchers on issues ranging from copyright management advice and education, to publishing contracts, to compliance with institutional or funder open access policies. Individual scholarly authors are rarely copyright law experts, but nonetheless want to understand the professional and institutional consequences of their publication decisions. Their intellectual legacies—and the public’s access to their insights—are endangered without help from experts in law and knowledge preservation. Campus resources can help authors understand the opportunities and challenges of scholarly communications in the digital age, but these staff are often overwhelmed with demand for their services.

With the support of this grant, Authors Alliance will develop training and curricular materials for scholarly communications officers, librarians, and other staff at member institutions. These training materials will complement the resources that we develop at the author-facing level, and they will ultimately cover open access, fair use, publication contracts, rights reversion, termination of transfer, and more. Our resources will help those tasked with training scholarly authors to quickly become proficient in these subject areas and keep abreast of the rapidly changing scholarly communications ecosystem. We expect that our institutional member portal will become a one-stop shop for scholarly communications information and resources that will increase the capacity of those who advise and serve authors.

“We are grateful to Arcadia for their support of this project, which will expand our ability to reach and support authors to further the public interest in the widespread creation and distribution of knowledge and culture,” said Brianna Schofield, Executive Director of Authors Alliance.

Organizational representatives who are interested in learning more about our institutional membership offerings can contact us at info@authorsalliance.org.

Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $500 million to projects around the world.

Authors Alliance, a non-profit organization based in Berkeley, CA, provides information and tools designed to help authors better understand and manage key legal, technological, and institutional aspects of authorship in the digital age.