The UCOLASC Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication [PDF] were drafted by the UC Academic Senate University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC) and subsequently endorsed by the Academic Council at its May 22, 2019 meeting. The original document linked above is bundled with cover letters that give context and procedural history for the Declaration, and is available from the Senate’s website. We provide this HTML copy on the OSC site as a convenience for readers.
To align our institutional policies and practices toward the goal of replacing subscription-based publishing with open access (OA), we propose that the University of California assert the following rights and principles when negotiating with publishers during journal license renewals:
- No copyright transfers. Our authors shall be allowed to retain copyright in their work and grant a Creative Commons Attribution license of their choosing.
- No restrictions on preprints. Our authors shall have the right to submit for publication work they have previously made available as preprints.
- No waivers of OA Policy. Publishers shall not require our authors to provide waivers of our Institutional OA Policy as a condition for publishing our work.
- No delays to sharing. Publishers shall make work by our authors immediately available for harvest or via automatic deposit into our Institutional OA repository or another public archive.
- No limitations on author reuse. Our authors shall have the right to reuse figures, tables, data, and text from their published work without permission or payment.
- No impediments to rights reversion. Publishers shall provide a simple process for our authors to regain copyright in their previously published work.
- No curtailment of copyright exceptions. Licenses shall not restrict, and should instead expressly protect, the rights of authors, institutions, and the public to reuse excerpts of published work consistent with legal exceptions and limitations on copyright such as fair use.
- No barriers to data availability. Our authors shall have the right to make all of their data, figures, and other supporting materials from their published work publicly available.
- No constraints on content mining. Publishers shall make licensed materials open, accessible, and machine-readable for text and data mining by our researchers, at no additional cost and under terms that allow retention and reuse of results.
- No closed metadata. Publishers shall make bibliographic records, usage metrics, and citation data for our authors freely available, easy to parse, and machine-readable.
- No free labor. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on peer review and editorial contributions by our authors in support of journals, and such contributions shall be taken into account when determining the cost of our subscriptions or OA fees for our authors.
- No long-term subscriptions. Publishers shall provide our Institution with plans and timelines for transitioning their subscription journals to OA.
- No permanent paywalls. Our Institution shall receive perpetual access for previously licensed content and back files shall be made freely available once a journal transitions to OA.
- No double payments. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on hybrid OA payments from our authors and such payments shall reduce the cost of our subscriptions.
- No hidden profits. Publishers shall use transparent pricing for the services they provide our authors when levying article processing charges and other fees associated with publishing.
- No deals without OA offsets. Our Institution shall only enter into publishing agreements that include offsets for OA publishing by our authors.
- No new paywalls for our work. Work by our authors shall be made OA on the publisher’s website as part of subscription terms for new journals.
- No non-disclosure agreements. Publisher agreements with our Institution shall be transparent and shall not contain terms that prevent the sharing of their contents.
