University of California Doubles Down on OA | The Scientist Magazine®

"'The University of California’s publishing arm, UC Press, this week (January 20) announced plans to roll out two new open-access (OA) publishing programs that it said will 'benefit authors and the entire academic community.' The first initiative is the launch of a mega journal modeled after PLOS One, called Collabra, which will publish original research. The second initiative, dubbed Luminos, will publish scholarly monographs. Collabra will pay its peer reviewers and editors, but they have the option to pass along that money to their institutions’ OA funds or back to Collabra to support the journal’s article processing charge-waiver fund. 'As part of the world’s greatest public research university we knew that we needed to make a significant investment to meet the changing publishing and dissemination needs of our audiences,' UC Press Director Alison Mudditt said in a statement. 'These programs have been shaped by hundreds of conversations with faculty, librarians, and other key stakeholders.'   'There’s a range of drivers here, but most importantly, OA is a natural extension of the research publishing we already do and aligns well with our mission of adding visibility and impact to transformative scholarship,' Mudditt told The Scholarly Kitchen. 'As a not-for-profit organization, we are in unique position to create partially subsidized models in which we can offset the high cost of entry and share revenues with the scholarly community in ways that allow more work to be published.'”