Statement endorsed by UCOLASC on February 16, 2022
The faculty-led Academic Senate of the University of California strongly recommends that all UC authors choose the open access publishing option.
The Academic Senate and UC libraries have been collaborating for over a decade to transform scholarly communication from a closed subscription-based publishing system to one where our work can be freely accessible to all. To this end, UC has recently been signing “transformative agreements” with many publishers as a way to repurpose funds spent on journal subscriptions to support open access publishing.
Under these agreements, the UC libraries pay part of the open access fee for all authors, and the full fee for authors who do not have research funds available for this purpose. Authors with available research funds are being asked to cover the remaining portion of the open access fee. The libraries are continuing to spend the same amount of money toward publications.
By making our research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible, open access publishing advances the University’s mission to serve the public good. Please support this mission by making your work open access.
If you are interested in learning more about the aims and foundations for UC’s open access agreements, please see:
- Call to Action for negotiating contracts for journals, prepared by the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC)
