Open Access

The University of California today (March 16) announced a pioneering open access agreement with the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, making significantly more of the University’s research available to people worldwide — immediately and at no cost. The deal will put more UC research into the hands of individuals across the globe at a time when international collaboration to fight COVID-19 has illuminated the value of open access to scientific findings.

The agreement is the largest of its kind in North America to date, bringing together UC, which generates nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output, and Elsevier, which disseminates about 17 percent of journal articles produced by UC faculty. The deal will double the number of articles made available through UC’s transformative open access agreements.

The University of California today (June 16) announced a transformative open access publishing agreement that will make more of the University’s research freely and immediately available to individuals and researchers across the globe. The deal furthers the global push for open access to scientific research by bringing together UC, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output, and Springer Nature, the world’s second-largest academic publisher.

The agreement, which is the largest open access agreement in North America to date, and the first for Springer Nature in the U.S., signals increasing global momentum and support for the open access movement. As leaders in accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, UC and Springer Nature aim to get research into the hands of scholars and the public to help solve the world’s most pressing problems, including those in the critically important fields of medicine and health care.

To celebrate International Open Access Week, join the LSA on Friday, October 25 from 3:00 - 4:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time for an Open Access Primer to get up to speed about Open Access. We will cover what it means for scholarly work to be “Open”, how to identify Open Access publishing options in linguistics, and how Open Access relates to other movements such as Open Data, Open Source, and Open Education. We will also provide a brief overview of the LSA's various Open Access initiatives. Finally, we will discuss how to incorporate and contextualize Open Scholarship in your scholarly practice and the benefits to you and your work.  This webinar will be of interest to anyone who publishes, or plans to publish, their work, as well as to those with an interest in Open Access issues.

Invited lecture, Cognitive Science Seminar (COGS 200), "Data Practices (in the 21st Century)".

Support the University of California in its attempt to transform the landscape of scholarly publishing. Boycott Elsevier journals by: (1) publishing your work elsewhere and (2) refusing to donate your time to them as a reviewer or editorial board member. (Read more…)

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals. (Read more…)

(Read also: A ‘transformative agreement’: Social media reacts to University of California cutting Elsevier subscription, February 28, 2019.)

This site was created by an informal group of U.S. institutions who have signed the Expression of Interest (EoI) of the OA2020 initiative, organized by the Max Planck Digital Library. These institutions believe that OA2020 represents a viable path forward to transitioning the corpus of scholarly journals from subscription-based to open access. (Read more…)

(Read also: UC San Diego Makes a Commitment to Open Access by Signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest, February 20, 2019.)

"Solving the world’s most pressing problems relies on ability to easily obtain knowledge" … "The future of groundbreaking research that improves the lives of people across the globe depends on open access to the world’s knowledge — and here, too, California is poised to lead. Several European countries are moving quickly to advance open access at their own public institutions. Now it’s our turn."

(Read also: University of California leads fight over access to research, December 25, 2018.)

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) will convene a group of people from scholarly societies, scholarly communities, library leadership, and other stakeholders with the goal to identify and define a shared, open scholarly agenda in order to promote concrete next steps toward a more equitable, open scholarly publishing infrastructure.

(A report of the meeting is now available here.)

A free two-day working forum for North American library or consortium leaders and key academic stakeholders centered on action-focused deliberations about redirecting subscription and other funds toward sustainable open access publishing. (Read more…)

(Read also: Participants from across North America converge to move the needle on open access, The crusade for open access, and what the Library is doing to help, explained, and CP2OA results are in: Open access efforts are taking flight.)

"[W]e as faculty representatives of our University, assert the rights of authors and affiliated stakeholders—who labor to produce works of knowledge and art of value to society—to own, control, and freely disseminate for the benefit of the public, the products of their efforts, including publications, data, metadata, and related research outputs. Backed by faculty resolve, we propose the following 18 principles to make scholarly communication more open, fair, transparent, and sustainable when applied as levers by UC during license negotiations with journal publishers."

(Read also: Championing Change in Journal Negotiations!)

We believe that a commitment to Open Access is central to UC’s mission of “providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge … and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.” (Read more…)

(Read also: Academic Council Affirms Commitment to Open Access Efforts like OA2020.)

"Open Access can and has been approached and implemented in many ways to serve its diverse constituencies. […] When and how do open policies and practices improve global participation in both the production and consumption of open scholarship?"

The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) and the University of California Libraries issue the following statement in response to recent actions by the new federal administration and in order to address resulting concerns about continued open access to and preservation of information, scholarship, and knowledge. (Read more…)

We, the undersigned Linguistics faculty of the 10 campuses of the University of California, state our support for the editorial team that has founded the fair open access journal Glossa after resigning en masse from Lingua due to the unwillingness of its publisher, Elsevier, to make the journal open access under the reasonable pricing terms desired by its editorial board. We recognize Glossa as the true successor to Lingua, and we pledge to support the new journal and its editorial team.

Furthermore, should Elsevier persist in publishing a journal under the Lingua name, we pledge not to submit our work for publication in that journal, nor to review papers or serve on the editorial board of that journal if asked. We also ask that the University of California libraries discontinue their subscription to Lingua.

Here are links to my writings on the evolving Lingua / Glossa story on Language Log (most co-authored with Kai von Fintel): Lingua is dead. Long live Glossa! (11/8/2015), UC linguistics faculty pledge support for Glossa, call for cancellation of Lingua (2/19/2016), Asleep at the wheel at Zombie Lingua? (9/30/2016), More Zombie Lingua shenanigans (8/17/2017).

(And here's a full list of OA-related posts on Language Log.)

The Academic Senate of the University of California adopted an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. A precursor to this policy was adopted by the UCSF Academic Senate on May 21, 2012.

On October 23, 2015, a Presidential Open Access Policy expanded open access rights and responsibilities to all other authors who write scholarly articles while employed at UC, including non-senate researchers, lecturers, post-doctoral scholars, administrative staff, librarians, and graduate students.

The panelists in this session explore issues in the future of publishing academic work from the standpoint of Open Access (OA), that is, free and unrestricted access by all to the results of academic research. A variety of perspectives are offered by the panel: editors of successful OA journals in Linguistics (Kai von Fintel, Lindsay Whaley), university librarians whose efforts are focussed on OA (Ellen Duranceau, Vika Zafrin), institutional directors of scholarly communication (Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Stuart Shieber), the Executive Director of the LSA (Alyson Reed), and a co-organizer of the session (Eric Baković).