On May 23, 2012, the University of California, San Francisco becomes the first UC campus to implement an open access policy. Under the proposed open access policy, UCSF faculty will make electronic versions of their scientific articles freely available to the public via an open-access repository such as eScholarship. The vote by the UCSF faculty senate was unanimous, making UCSF the largest scientific institution and the first public university to adopt an open-access policy. In February 2008, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences were the first university of adopt an open access policy. Since then, dozens of other universities worldwide have adopted institutional open access policies.
UCSF Implements Policy to Make Research Papers Freely Available to the Public (UCSF News Center)
Meantime, a discussion of a UC systemwide open access policy is under discussion by representatives to the UC Academic Senate Committee on Libraries and Scholarly Communication. Read more: UC Open Access Policy Proposal.
This post originally appeared in the UCB Scholarly Communication News at Berkeley blog.