Moore, a 41-year-old transgender Berkeley resident, died of an accidental drug overdose while in police custody in February, but the details of her death did not come to light until the release of the report on May 3 — nearly 3 months after her death.

A death in police custody is inherently an extremely sensitive situation — one which the department needed to communicate with the public about quickly and extensively.

Instead, not only was an autopsy report not released in a timely manner, but the police failed to provide a meaningful reason for the delay to the public.

Furthermore, before the death occurred in police custody, the autopsy should have been done by an outside agency other than the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Coroner’s Bureau to ensure its validity and rid the police department of unnecessary suspicion.

Employing an outside organization to complete an internal investigation is not unheard of. Following the events of Occupy Cal in November 2011, an independent review of police actions were ordered to make certain that no bias was involved.

Although department spokesperson Jennifer Coats apologized for the lengthy delay and noted that the department wanted to ensure a “proper and thorough investigation for Moore,” an apology is not enough.

If Berkeley Police Department expects to be valued and trusted by the people it aims to protect and serve, it needs to be prompt and accountable regarding its own conduct.

The department should learn from this incident and create a better procedure for the future — one in which it moves forward with transparency as a fundamental value.

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AB 609, which was introduced to the state assembly in February, aims to make results of government-funded research freely available to the public online. The bill follows a February mandate by the Obama administration requiring similar accessibility for federally funded research papers.

Open access to research is an important part of making education increasingly democratized and ensuring equal access to knowledge — regardless of socioeconomic status.

This cause is particularly relevant to the university. The university is renowned for its scientific and humanities research worldwide and, as a public institution, making this knowledge as widely available as possible is integral to fulfilling its mission. Considering that UC Berkeley will spend an estimated $30 million on access to 7,500 academic journals this year alone, open access could make knowledge sharing between institutions far more affordable.

Though supporting AB 609 is a step in the right direction, the bill also has its flaws.
For one thing, though the bill has not yet passed, its current language seems to indicate that the university is not considered a state agency held to the same standards of open sharing.

The university should not be exempt from making its research public if it intends to benefit from other state institutions’ public research.

AB 609 was recently amended to allow for a 12-month embargo period, during which research will be published in a peer-review journal before it is shared, but this is too long to be kept behind paywalls.

Support of the bill is also not all the university can and should do to make itself a strong advocate for open access.

The university should also support programs like the Open Access Initiative, which was co-founded by two campus undergraduates and suggests awarding less profit to publishers, who have less of a role in the research process.

Critics worry that open access to research could come at the cost of quality. That must not be the case for open access to be meaningful. There is a reason research must be peer-reviewed and vetted thoroughly before it is published, a process that must continue regardless of whether research papers are available for free.

As the open access movement gains momentum, it raises a few questions regarding different types of academic research. For instance, how should we provide the same type of access to humanities research, which is often published in a different format than science journals?

We need to be certain that this difference in format does not result in hard science becoming more available while humanities research remains under wraps, which could in turn lead to a greater divide between the disciplines.

The movement for open access to research parallels the one we are currently seeing in online education. Universities like MIT, Harvard and even UC Berkeley are joining programs that allow for affordable ways to access lectures and classes online — why shouldn’t research journals be made available in the same way?

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