From: "Taylor, Anneliese" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 00:32:57 +0000

University of California, San Francisco Press Release
May 23, 2012


UCSF IMPLEMENTS POLICY TO MAKE RESEARCH PAPERS FREELY ACCESSIBLE TO PUBLIC

Health Sciences Campus Becomes Largest in Nation to Adopt Open-access Policy

The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of
current and future scientific articles freely available to the public,
helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and
scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.

The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest
scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy
and among the first public universities to do so.

“Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone
who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general
public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,” said
Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee
on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative
at UCSF. “The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers
to scientific research,” he said. “By opening the currently closed
system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the
taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in
research.”

UCSF is the nation’s largest public recipient of funding from the
National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year,
valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads
to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded,
peer-reviewed scientific journals, but the majority of those papers
are only available to subscribers who pay ever-increasing fees to the
journals. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends
close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals.

Such restrictions and costs have been cited among the obstacles in
translating scientific advances from laboratory research into improved
clinical care.

The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles
freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and
thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google
Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national
open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or
published as open-access publications. They will then be available to
be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.

Schneider said hurdles do remain, including convincing commercial
publishers to modify their exclusive publication contracts to
accommodate such a policy. Some publishers already have demonstrated
their willingness to do so, he said, but others, especially premier
journals, have been less inclined to allow the system to change.

Under terms negotiated with the NIH, a major proponent of open access,
some of the premier journals only allow open access in PubMed Central
one year after publication; prior to that only the titles and
summaries of articles are freely available.  How such journals will
handle the UCSF policy remains to be seen, Schneider said.

The UCSF policy gives the university a nonexclusive license to
distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in
scientific or medical journals. Researchers are able to “opt out” if
they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher
is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy.  “The hope,” said
Schneider, “is that faculty will think twice about where they publish,
and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the
policy.”

Full press release:
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/05/12056/ucsf-implements-policy-make-research-papers-freely-accessible-public

Full text of policy and supporting documents
http://senate.ucsf.edu/2011-2012/j-lib-openaccess.html

Jennifer O’Brien Interim Executive Director/News
Source: Kristen Bole (415) 502-6397 (NEWS)
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: www.ucsf.edu
Twitter: @KristenBole

Anneliese Taylor
Head of Collection Management
University of California, San Francisco Library
530 Parnassus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840
(415) 476-8415
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