From: Catherine Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2013 17:45:23 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, August 2, 2013
UC Office of the Academic Senate

University of California Faculty Senate Passes Open Access Policy

http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/

Contact:
Professor Christopher Kelty, UCLA
310-880-2433; [log in to unmask]

Professor Richard Schneider, UC San Francisco
415-305-7992; [log in to unmask]

Professor Robert Powell, Chair, Academic Council
510-987-0711; [log in to unmask]

The Academic Senate of the University of California has passed an Open
Access Policy, ensuring that future research articles authored by
faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public
at no charge. “The Academic Council’s adoption of this policy on July
24, 2013, came after a six-year process culminating in two years of
formal review and revision,” said Robert Powell, chair of the Academic
Council. “Council’s intent is to make these articles widely—and
freely— available in order to advance research everywhere.”  Articles
will be available to the public without charge via eScholarship (UC’s
open access repository) in tandem with their publication in scholarly
journals.  Open access benefits researchers, educational institutions,
businesses, research funders and the public by accelerating the pace
of research, discovery and innovation and contributing to the mission
of advancing knowledge and encouraging new ideas and services.

Chris Kelty, Associate Professor of Information Studies, UCLA, and
chair of the UC University Committee on Library and Scholarly
Communication (UCOLASC), explains, “This policy will cover more
faculty and more research than ever before, and it sends a powerful
message that faculty want open access and they want it on terms that
benefit the public and the future of research.”

The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty at all 10 campuses of the
University of California, and as many as 40,000 publications a year.
It follows more than 175 other universities who have adopted similar
so-called “green” open access policies.  By granting a license to the
University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with
publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and
publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for
future research publications.  Previously, publishers had sole control
of the distribution of these articles.  All research publications
covered by the policy will continue to be subjected to rigorous peer
review; they will still appear in the most prestigious journals across
all fields; and they will continue to meet UC’s standards of high
quality.  Learn more about the policy and its implementation here:
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/openaccesspolicy/

UC is the largest public research university in the world and its
faculty members receive roughly 8% of all research funding in the U.S.
 With this policy UC Faculty make a commitment to the public
accessibility of research, especially, but not only, research paid for
with public funding by the people of California and the United States.
 This initiative is in line with the recently announced White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) 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.” The new UC Policy also follows a similar policy
passed in 2012 by the Academic Senate at the University of California,
San Francisco, which is a health sciences campus.

"The UC Systemwide adoption of an Open Access (OA) Policy represents a
major leap forward for the global OA movement and a well-deserved
return to taxpayers who will now finally be able to see first-hand the
published byproducts of their deeply appreciated investments in
research” said Richard A. Schneider, Professor, Department of
Orthopaedic Surgery and chair of the Committee on Library and
Scholarly Communication at UCSF.   “The ten UC campuses generate
around 2-3% 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 anywhere, whether they are
colleagues, students, or members of the general public"

The adoption of this policy across the UC system also signals to
scholarly publishers that open access, in terms defined by faculty and
not by publishers, must be part of any future scholarly publishing
system.  The faculty remains committed to working with publishers to
transform the publishing landscape in ways that are sustainable and
beneficial to both the University and the public.

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