Stanford and UC-Berkeley are among the 35 universities that have joined to form a wire service to feed their own accounts of their discoveries directly to top news sites on the Internet.

The new servict, Futurity, will provide articles to Yahoo News, Google News, MySpace and Twitter.

“We’ve been really concerned. Our preference would be to have the level of coverage of science and research that we enjoyed for decades,” Lisa Lapin, assistant vice president for university communications at Stanford, told the Mercury News. “But the major news organizations haven’t had the resources to provide that independent, objective look at what we are doing. It’s been declining.”

The Merc story quotes Charlie Petit, a former science reporter at U.S. News & World Report and the Chron, as saying the university-written content should be clearly labeled so the public is aware of the difference between it and stories written by independent journalists.