President Dynes on April 2 sent a message to the UC San Diego community, naming his recommendation for the next chancellor of the campus -- Marye Anne Fox, currently chancellor of North Carolina State University.
The UC Board of Regents is scheduled to meet April 12 to act on the appointment.
Dynes worked with an advisory committee before recommending that Fox be named as his successor as UCSD chancellor.
Fox has served as chancellor of North Carolina State University since 1998 and previously was vice president for research at the University of Texas at Austin. A distinguished physical organic chemist, she has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She also is a member of President Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
"Dr. Fox is widely regarded as a fine teacher and mentor, a dedicated researcher, and a seasoned administrator of a large and active public research institution. In my conversations with her, I have been pleased to hear her commitment to excellence and her view of UCSD as an international leader in the pursuit of higher learning and discovery.
The search was highly competitive and featured "many candidates who brought a dazzling array of qualifications," Dynes said. "In the end, my decision was guided by my belief that Dr. Fox brings the combination of skills needed to build on UCSD's reputation as one of the finest universities in the world."
Dynes also thanked Acting Chancellor Marsha Chandler. "I have deeply valued Marsha's skills and insights for many years and believe she has many important roles still to play, both during this transition and in the future," he said.
More about Fox is available on her Web site at http://chancellor.ncsu.edu/maf.html.
UC signs on with PLoS to promote open access
UC libraries on April 1 announced that that UC has become an institutional member of the Public Library of Science.
The non-profit organization was spearheaded in 2000 to make scientific and medical literature a public resource. Nobel laureate and former National Institutes of Health director and UC San Francisco faculty member Harold Varmus helped spearhead the San Francisco-based organization. The group recently launched PLoS Biology -- the first of a suite of PLoS peer-reviewed open-access journals, which are available for free online and are subsidized largely by author-side charges for publication (see: http://www.plosbiology.org/).
Scientists affiliated with member institutions are entitled to reduced fees for publishing in PLoS journals.
Efforts like PLoS offer an alternative as traditional commercial journals and online journals become increasingly unsustainable for library budgets, said Daniel Greenstein, UC associate vice provost for scholarly information. "It seems clear that a range of strategies is needed to evolve scho-larly communication systems so that they continue to support scholarship and the academy."
In addition to the important gesture of early support and membership in PLoS, UC has joined and supported other efforts, such as BioMed Central and the Association of Research Libraries' Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, he said. UC libraries also have their own alternative publications and open access repositories.
"The support for open-access publishing from the University of California is an important statement of its commitment to share the products of scientific research with the citizens who fund it," said Helen Doyle of PLoS. "We hope that the libraries' effort to maximize the impact of the studies that UC researchers conduct will serve as a model."