Open Access

The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an open access policy on July 24, 2013.  By granting UC a license prior to any contractual arrangements with publishers, faculty members can make their published research articles widely and publicly available to students, scholars, and the general public at no charge, increasing readership of and citations to their work while also re-using it for various purposes or modifying it for future research publications. The policy covers more than eight thousand UC faculty and as many as forty thousand articles a year by faculty at all ten UC campuses.

Faculty at UCLA, UCI, and UCSF begin depositing articles in eScholarship on November 1, 2013. Progress on deposit implementation will be reviewed during the following year. Deposit of articles by faculty on the remaining campuses is expected to begin on November 1, 2014.

UCLA librarians are working to help make faculty adoption of this policy as seamless as possible.  You are welcome to contact them by email with any questions.

A simple how-to guide is also available in PDF format.

Successful tools already in place at UCSF have been adapted to make compliance with the policy as smooth and simple as possible for faculty, including:

• Deposit: Submit an article to UC’s eScholarship repository or notify UCLA librarians if it is already open access or available in another open access repository.
• Embargo: Request verification that the article will not be displayed in UC's eScholarship repository until the publisher's required embargo period has expired.
• Addendum Generator: Notify publishers of author rights under the open access policy by generating an addendum to attach to the publisher's author agreement.
• Opt-out Waiver Generator: If required by a publisher, request a waiver to opt out of the open access policy for a single article

Additional Information

• Frequently Asked Questions
• UCLA Professor of Information Studies Chris Kelty on the Policy (video)
• Policy History: Supporting materials include letters from the Academic Council and University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication and drafts of the policy
• UC Publisher OA Agreements and Discounts: The University of California has transformative open access publishing agreements and publishing discounts in place with a broad range of scholarly publishers, including several of the world’s largest commercial journal publishers, as well as society, not-for-profit, and fully open access publishers.
• UC Open Access Fact Sheet: learn how to budget for open access publishing when creating your research grant proposal.