Transitioning journals to open access: Guidance from and for the field - Office of Scholarly Communication

"One key objective of University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) is to coordinate and offer educational resources related to scholarly publishing. On the OSC website, authors can find guides to copyright, open access (OA), research impact, peer review, and more. In real life, OSC members are also “out in the field” at our respective libraries and university presses, offering consultations and support for UC scholars and authors on a multitude of publishing issues.

Over the past two years, we have engaged in an increasing number of discussions with journal editors interested in transitioning their journals to open access. We have also learned a few lessons in the process–particularly regarding the specific issues that any OA-aspiring journal must address, e.g., choosing publishing platforms, funding models, copyright and licensing policies, and communications strategies.

Given OSC’s mission to make educational materials about publishing more widely available, we are excited to have distilled these recent experiences into a practical toolkit aimed at supporting journal editors and publishers and the organizations or libraries that work with them. This toolkit, which you can find on our new OSC page Transitioning Journals to OA, includes a variety of resources for those interested in the OA transitioning process..."