Open Access#
What is Open Access?#
Definition
Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
SPARC, https://sparcopen.org/open-access
Learn more about Open Access through the UC Berkeley Office of Scholarly Communication: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarly-communication/open-access-publishing/what-is-open-access
University of California Open Access Policies#
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. 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.
Pursuant to these policies, UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students can make a copy of their scholarship available in the UC’s open access repository, called eScholarship because a license is reserved for the University to preserve and post an author final version (post-print).
The UC system-wide Office of Scholarly Communications also has a helpful guide on both the OA policies and depositing.
Publish in an open access journal#
Get help to defray article processing charges#
If you are publishing in a fully open access journal, the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) can reimburse your fees paid for article processing charges (APCs).
To read about eligibility and submit a form for reimbursement of your APC, check out our BRII guide. It will walk you through the application process. The BRII program is open to authors in any discipline, and especially encourages applicants from the humanities and social sciences.
Note that the BRII program reimburses for APCs when you publish in fully open access journals. Unfortunately, BRII can’t reimburse for publishing in “hybrid” OA journals—ones that charge us for a subscription for read access, and an additional payment to make a copy open access—because of the double payment situation that creates for the Library.
Publish open access through a UC-wide transformative agreement#
The University of California has entered into several transformative open access agreements with publishers. Over time, these arrangements facilitate a cost-effective transition from paying for subscriptions to paying to publish open access articles. Typically these agreements provide free reading access to the UC community, and support open access publishing by UC authors by defraying some or all of the article processing charges.
Here are the UC-wide transformative agreements to which authors can take part:
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Cambridge University Press Candian Science Publishing Company of Biologists Elsevier Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) National Academy of Sciences Public Library of Science (PLOS) Royal Society Springer Nature Other APC discounts and waivers
As a member of the UC Berkeley community, you may also be entitled to other discounts off of many APCs through our membership and license agreements. For up-to-date information see the UC-wide list of publisher discounts.