Author: Brian Quigley

The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an Open Access Policy (PDF) on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty at all 10 campuses of the University of California, and as many as 40,000 publications a year.

Open Access (OA) is scholarly literature that is free, digital, and available to anyone online with no embargo period. Anyone with access to the Internet may read, download, and copy an OA article. The new UC policy follows more than 175 other universities who have adopted similar so-called "green" open access policies. Green OA allows authors to publish, as they always have, in traditional commercial or society journals and then post an author’s version on eScholarship. That research then becomes widely available and discoverable via tools like Google.

In the full Academic Senate statement on the new policy, Richard A. Schneider, UCSF Professor and chair of the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication at UCSF states, "The ten UC campuses generate around 2-3% of all the peer-reviewed articles published in the world every year, and this policy will make many of those articles freely available to anyone who is interested anywhere, whether they are colleagues, students, or members of the general public."

What does this mean for UC Berkeley faculty? Three campuses (UCSF, UCLA, UCI) will move forward with the policy this fall, with Berkeley joining in Fall 2014. The Library will develop supporting materials to assist Berkeley faculty.

For more information on the new policy see:

• UC Open Access Policy (PDF; complete text from the Academic Senate)
• Frequently Asked Questions
• UC Reshaping Scholarly Communications website
• Daily Californian article on UC Open Access policy

For questions, contact the Library’s open access group.

Originally posted to the UC Berkeley Scholarly Communication News blog.