Under most of UC’s open access publishing agreements, existing library subscription funds have been repurposed to instead provide financial support to help UC authors pay open access fees. Library subscription funds, however, are not sufficient to cover the full cost of open access publishing for every UC author. The funding models for these agreements depend upon authors who do have research funds to pay a portion of the open access fees. This allows the UC libraries to offer financial support to all UC authors, while ensuring that authors without grant funds can be fully covered if they choose to publish open access.

If you determine that you do not have sufficient funds to cover the entire author’s share (after the libraries’ automatic payment of the first $1,000 of the APC), you should request full funding. There is no mechanism for a partial contribution to the author’s share.

Authors are encouraged to budget for publication costs in future grant proposals. UC’s open access fact sheet for researchers applying for grants provides more details. 

The data collected is used in aggregate by the UC libraries to evaluate, manage and improve our open access funding support programs. All responses are anonymized and the libraries will not attempt to verify the status of your research grants. Your response will not affect your eligibility.

As long as you are affiliated with UC and are the article’s corresponding author, your funding request will be approved, in most cases immediately. For some publishers, due to the large volume of articles by UC authors, it may take up to 48 hours for you to receive an email confirmation from the publisher. To expedite approval, please use your UC email address and/or indicate your UC affiliation when submitting your manuscript for publication. 

If the corresponding author is not affiliated with UC, you will be responsible for paying the APC if you publish open access.

You do not need to contact your campus library. If requesting full funding of the APC, you will submit your funding request through the publisher’s manuscript submission portal and it will be automatically routed to the UC libraries for payment. If you have any questions, contact OpenAccessInquiries@ucop.edu.

Acknowledgement of the libraries’ funding is appreciated but not required. If you choose to note it, please include the following: 

“[Partial/Full] funding for publishing this article open access was provided by the University of California Libraries under a transformative open access agreement with the publisher.”

There are no caps on the number of articles published nor on the amount of funding you receive. As long as you are the corresponding author and conducted the work while affiliated with UC, you are eligible.

Yes, you are eligible if you are the article’s corresponding author and the work was done while you were affiliated with UC, regardless of your role or personnel status. 

To expedite approval, please use your UC email address and/or specify your UC affiliation when submitting your manuscript for publication. If you have questions, contact OpenAccessInquiries@ucop.edu. 

Yes, if you are the article’s corresponding author and the work was done while you were affiliated with UC, you are eligible. In general, articles should be published within one year after departing UC in order to be approved for funding. Your UC affiliation must appear in the final published version of the article. If you have questions, please contact OpenAccessInquiries@ucop.edu. 

If you published your article within the term of an agreement but did not select open access, your article may be retroactively eligible in some cases. The effective dates for each publisher agreement are provided on UC’s Open Access Publishing Agreements and Discounts page. 

Generally, articles published before an agreement’s start date are not retroactively eligible for library funding support. Please contact OpenAccessInquiries@ucop.edu if you have questions about your article’s eligibility.

There is currently no single list of the roughly 8,000 journals covered by UC’s publishing agreements. Please check the Open Access Publishing Agreements and Discounts page to see if your journal’s publisher has an active agreement with UC. 

Some UC campus libraries have agreements with other publishers. Check your campus library’s website for information.

UC continuously seeks to expand the number of journals covered by open access agreements as our existing subscription agreements come up for renewal. See how we set priorities for engaging with publishers to negotiate transformative open access agreements. If there is a specific journal or publisher you recommend adding, please contact OpenAccessInquiries@ucop.edu.

A few UC campuses have funds to help pay for open access fees that aren’t otherwise covered by a transformative agreement. Check your campus’ fund for eligibility and other guidelines. You can also utilize UC’s open access policies that enable authors to deposit their final accepted manuscript into UC’s open access repository, eScholarship. (The final accepted manuscript is the version of the paper that includes changes from peer review, but does not contain the publisher’s formatting and copyediting that appear in the final publisher’s PDF).

Generally, all articles containing original research are eligible. Other eligible article types vary by publisher. See the publisher agreement webpage for your journal’s publisher for details. Books and book chapters are generally not eligible under these journal agreements.

While it is entirely up to you as an author to decide which license to assign to your article, the Academic Senate recommends choosing a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This license, which is presented as the default selection under most of UC’s publisher agreements, allows you, the author, to retain the copyright for your work and allows others to reuse and share your work with proper attribution. 

Some publishers also offer the choice of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) or Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licenses, both of which place some limits on how others may use your work. Please be aware that some publishers place restrictions on your rights with CC BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND licenses. UC is addressing author rights in its ongoing negotiations with publishers. Learn more about the Creative Commons license options or contact your campus library for help.

If you are identified as a UC-affiliated author in the publisher’s manuscript submission portal (typically by using your UC email address when you submit your article), UC’s funding support will be applied automatically. 

• If you are contributing grant funds towards the open access fee, you will be sent an invoice for your share of the fee.
• If you are requesting full coverage of the open access fee, you will not be invoiced for any amount. The UC libraries will pay the full amount directly to the publisher.

See the publisher agreement webpage for your journal’s publisher for specific details.

Please contact OpenAccessInquiries@ucop.edu and we will assist you in resolving the invoice.