OA Rules at the University of California

"The largest public research university in the world recently committed all of its 10 campuses to open access (OA). The facility system receives about 8% of all research funding in the U.S. for its more than 8,000 faculty members, who issue as much as 40,000 publications a year, an output that represents 2% to 3% of all peer-reviewed articles. The Academic Senate of the University of California (UC) passed an Open Access Policy to make future research articles authored by faculty available to the public at no charge through its eScholarship repository. The process to make this decision has taken 6 years. It still comes with an opt-out feature that allows individual faculty members to waive OA, a situation that has left some OA advocates doubting the full effectiveness of the policy. However, the California Digital Library (CDL), which manages the program, already has a long list of publishers willing to go 'green' and negotiations underway with others. The policy extends beyond publicly funded research, but it does fit in with the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directive requiring “each Federal Agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to results of the research funded by the Federal Government.” A bill is now before the California state legislature to require OA to state-sponsored research as well. The new UC Policy also follows a similar policy passed in 2012 by the Academic Senate at UC San Francisco, which is a health sciences campus well-acquainted with the OA leadership of the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine. Scholarly articles are the only content controlled by the policy, though the eScholarship repository has a broader array of content and serves the campus with more than 50 OA journals and publishing platform tools. The UC OA policy is not meant to address other written products, such as books, popular articles, commissioned articles, fiction and poetry, encyclopedia entries, ephemeral writings, lecture notes, lecture videos, or other copyrighted works."