Sciences & Engineering

The University of California, Santa Barbara Library recently finalized the processing and digitization of the faculty papers of renowned theoretical physicist and string theorist Joseph Polchinski (1954–2018). The papers offer scholars and enthusiasts unprecedented access to the works of one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Picture students divided into groups in a classroom, each group intently focused on a pile of Lego® building bricks. You’re probably picturing children at an elementary school, but in this particular case, they are graduate students at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara. Their task? To build a fantasy creation of their liking, with the proviso that they must describe their construction, in writing, in a way that it can be replicated.

The UC Santa Barbara Library has acquired the faculty papers of Nobel Laureate and notable professor emeritus Herbert Kroemer (1928–2024). The collection was donated by his daughters, Ursula Leimbach and Angela Sherwin, and contains research and teaching papers, ephemera and digital materials related to Kroemer’s career.

The University of California announced two new open access publishing agreements today. The first supports open access publishing with the technical professional organization IEEE, which is among the largest publishers of UC research. The other is an extension of UC’s 2020 agreement with Springer Nature that adds funding support for open access publishing in the prestigious Nature journals; previously only titles in the Springer portfolio were eligible.

The University of California has entered into a two-year transformative open access agreement with SAGE Publishing. The agreement runs from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2024, and covers open access publishing and reading access to SAGE’s hybrid and fully open access journals. The agreement includes open access publishing of an unlimited number of articles by corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and provides researchers throughout the UC system with expanded reading access to the full portfolio of SAGE journals.