University of California Will Provide Free Access to Science Research

"Learning how to conduct thorough research is crucial for college students, especially those seeking science degrees, and the University of California (UC) will soon make the process much easier. The college's Academic Senate recently passed a new "Open Access Policy" that will provide all faculty-written research articles to students and the public at no cost ... Until this point, publishing an article in a scholarly journal meant that the publisher would have complete control. The cost of publishing a paper in a subscription journal is also much higher than working with an open-access option. Specifically, Nature points out that to publish research in the journal Cell Reports an author would have to shell out $5,000. On the reverse end, PLoS ONE, which operates on an open-access plan, can publish an article for under $1,500. By saving money on the publishing end, researchers will have more funds to dedicate to their primary goals of finding and studying information ... In addition to making it easier for researchers to publish and share their work with the scientific community, this new policy will also be a boon to students pursuing bachelor's degrees and master's degrees in science-based programs. Getting access to restricted publications may be difficult for some students, depending on what access their colleges have to certain journals.   'The 10 UC campuses generate around 2 to 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 in them, whether they are colleagues, students or members of the general public,' said Richard A. Schneider, a professor in UC's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and chair of the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication at UC-San Francisco.  The U.S. government allocates a whopping 8% of its entire research budget to UC faculty each year, as it is the largest public research facility in the world. UC is not alone in making the switch to open-access publishing, and it is far from the first to choose this route. According to Nature, 11% of the articles released in 2011 were published by open-access journals, and UC indicated that 175 other universities have already adopted similar policies."