The University of California (UC) Libraries are proud to join international partners to support the establishment of OA Forward. An internationally governed initiative, OA Forward is led by DEAL Open Access Services (DEAS) together with UC, Consortia Colombia, the Council of Australasian University Librarians, the Max Planck Society, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), and the South African National Library and Information Consortium.
OA Forward will build on the achievements of the OA2020 and ESAC initiatives previously hosted by the Max Planck Society and further strengthen and advance open access publisher negotiations and open scholarly communication. As noted in the DEAS press release for OA Forward, “The OA2020 and ESAC initiatives reshaped the landscape of scholarly publishing agreements, enabling hundreds of thousands of research articles to be published openly each year, driving transparency around publishing costs, and removing the burden of publication charges from individual authors… OA Forward reflects a further step in this development: partners across five continents are now working within a common framework, with broader reach, stronger legitimacy, and shared responsibility across a more unified international community.” A signature initiative for OA Forward continues to be the biannual Berlin Open Access Conference, bringing together national delegations of research institutions and their libraries from around the globe to assess progress and share strategies.
With great appreciation to DEAS and the global community advancing open access, the UC Council of University Librarians (CoUL) accepted the DEAS invitation for UC to serve as an inaugural contributing partner for OA Forward. CoUL also nominated Günter Waibel, associate vice provost and California Digital Library executive director, to serve as the UC voting member on the OA Forward Steering Committee.
“We remain deeply committed to UC’s pursuit of open and equitable access to research and the scholarly record,” said William Garrity, CoUL chair for FY 2025-26 and university librarian and vice provost of digital scholarship at UC Davis. “And the DEAS-supported global community continues to provide a valuable partnership framework for seeking change and impact in furtherance of our shared goals and values.”
“I am excited to represent the UC Libraries on the OA Forward Steering Committee,” said Waibel. “By working within this new global framework, the UC Libraries can better align our strategies with international peers, turning collective insights from the Berlin Open Access Conference into local action that strengthens our negotiations and ensures the scholarly record remains in the hands of the research community.”
The UC Libraries participation in OA Forward reflects the University’s longstanding involvement in this community. All ten campuses and the UC Office of the President are signatories of the OA2020 Expression of Interest to pursue large-scale implementation of open access to scholarly journals, with UC-wide support from administrators, faculty and libraries alike.
The OA Forward website will be populated with details in the coming months. In the meantime, community resources, materials and activities remain accessible on the OA2020 and ESAC webpages.
Tags: Open Access, UC Libraries
