We’re delighted to announce that as of March 10, UC authors will be able to begin making research they publish in Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) journals freely available for anyone to read by taking advantage of the university’s new transformative open access agreement with CSP, the first such agreement for a Canadian journal publisher.

This new transformative agreement – which runs from January 2021 through December 2023 – covers open access publishing in the full portfolio of Canadian Science Publishing journals, including hybrid (subscription-based) and open access journals.  

The agreement enables corresponding authors at nine UC campuses to publish an unlimited number of research articles immediately open access. Under the agreement, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee, or article processing charge (APC), for all UC authors who choose to publish in a CSP journal. Authors are asked to pay the remainder if they have research funds available to do so. Authors who do not have research funds available can request full funding of the APC from the libraries, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access in CSP journals. 

“Cost sharing between academic libraries and funders ensures researchers have an affordable option to disseminate their science in an open format,” Suzanne Kettley, Chief Executive Officer at CSP, said of this model. By combining funding from the libraries with authors’ grant funds, the agreement provides a model for how institutions that produce a significant amount of grant-funded research can create a sustainable and inclusive path to full open access.

CSP is exploring how to shift from subscription-based business models to models that make it easier and more affordable for researchers to publish their work open access. “Access to peer-reviewed science has never been more important. As a not-for-profit navigating the switch from subscription to open access, we see transformative models as a sustainable way to open up the scientific literature,” Kettley added.

CSP, a mission-driven organization, and UC, a public university, share a commitment to supporting researchers who wish to make their research freely and openly available for anyone to read. 

“With our shared vision of a future where science and scholarship are openly available to all, UC is delighted to partner with Canadian Science Publishing on an open access agreement,” says Ivy Anderson, associate executive director of UC’s California Digital Library. “We want to encourage a diverse and equitable publishing ecosystem in which mission-based publishers can thrive, and very much appreciate CSP’s willingness to implement UC’s shared funding model in their first open access agreement in the US in a joint effort toward building sustainable open access models. The agreement is UC’s first with a publisher in Canada and is an example of UC’s interest in developing transformative agreements with publishers of every scale and across all disciplines.”

For more detail, please see our overview of the CSP open access agreement, and CSP’s press release.

If you have questions, please contact your UC campus library:

About UC’s Transformative Journal Agreements:

Transformative open access agreements support UC’s mission as a public university and advance the global shift toward sustainable open access publishing by making more UC-authored research articles open to the world, while maintaining journal affordability. UC seeks to partner with publishers of all types, sizes and disciplines to jointly advance a worldwide transition to open access across the entire landscape of scholarly journal publishing. For more on these aims and principles, see UC’s Call to Action for Negotiating Journal Agreements at UC, the UC faculty Academic Senate’s Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication, and UC’s priorities for publisher negotiations.

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