Does the UC Open Access Policy miss the mark? Depends on which mark. - Office of Scholarly Communication

"While 100% policy compliance sounds admirable — and is always the implicit point of comparison for any lesser compliance rate (always in percentages!) — it is a narrow and arbitrary definition of success that relies entirely and exclusively on the metrics of policy participation to gauge effect. Let’s take a moment to consider some other measures of success, particularly in the setting of the University of California’s open access policy....

Finally, in our preoccupation with low compliance rates for open access policies, we often forget to highlight the transformative rights declarations of these policies, which are purely independent of compliance and apply to all authors. Regardless of whether or not they deposit their articles in their local repository, authors at institutions with opt-out, rights-retention policies are no longer beholden to publishing agreements that vary from publisher to publisher, are hard to keep track of, and may leave authors with few — or no — rights in their own work. This is a big deal....

[Waivers of the UC license area "are rare — and growing rarer. We should expect THIS." ...

It has been eight years since the Harvard faculty adopted the first institutional open access policy in the United States, and many other policies have followed. Almost a decade into this institutional policy work, open access has become an expectation rather than an experiment. We should celebrate THIS...."