My last two blog posts have been about the new open access policy that applies to the entire University of California system. For big open science nerds like myself, this is exciting progress and deserves much ado. For the on-the-ground researcher at a UC, knee-deep in grants and lecture preparation, the ado could probably be skipped in lieu of a straightforward explanation of how to comply with the procedure. So here goes.
Who & When:
- 1 November 2013: Faculty at UC Irvine, UCLA, and UCSF
- 1 November 2014: Faculty at UC Berkeley, UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Riverside
Note: The policy applies only to ladder-rank faculty members. Of course, graduate students and postdocs should strongly consider participating as well.
To comply, faculty members have two options:
Option 1: Out-of-the-box open access
. There are two ways to do this:
- Publishing in an open access-only journal (see examples here). Some have fees and others do not.
- Publishing with a more traditional publisher, but paying a fee to ensure the manuscript is publicly available. These are article-processing charges (APCs) and vary widely depending on the journal. For example, Elsevier’s Ecological Informatics charges $2,500, while Nature charges $5,200.
Learn more about different journals’ fees and policies: Directory of Open Access Journals: www.doaj.org
Option 2: Deposit your final manuscript in an open access repository.
In this scenario, you can publish in whatever journal you prefer – regardless of its openness. Once the manuscript is published, you take action to make a version of the article freely and openly available.
As UC faculty (or any UC researcher, including grad students and postdocs), you can comply via Option 2 above by depositing your publications in UC’s eScholarship open access repository. The CDL Access & Publishing Group is currently perfecting a user-friendly, efficient workflow for managing article deposits into eScholarship. The new workflow will be available as of November 1st. Learn more.
Does this still sound like too much work? Good news! The Publishing Group is also working on a harvesting tool that will automate deposit into eScholarship. Stay tuned – the estimated release of this tool is June 2014.
An Addendum: Are you not a UC affiliate? Don’t fret! You can find your own version of eScholarship (i.e., an open access repository) by going to OpenDOAR. Also see my full blog post about making your publications open access.
Why?
Academic libraries must pay exorbitant fees to provide their patrons (researchers) with access to scholarly publications. The very patrons who need these publications are the ones who provide the content in the form of research articles. Essentially, the researchers are paying for their own work, by proxy via their institution’s library.
What if you don’t have access? Individuals without institutional affiliations (e.g., between jobs), or who are affiliated with institutions that have no/a poorly funded library (e.g., in 2nd or 3rd world countries), depend on open access articles for keeping up with the scholarly literature. The need for OA isn’t limited to jobless or international folks, though. For proof, one only has to notice that the Twitter community has developed a hash tag around this, #Icanhazpdf (Hat tip to the Lolcats phenomenon). Basically, you tweet the name of the article you can’t access and add the hashtag in hopes that someone out in the Twittersphere can help you out and send it to you.
Special thanks to Catherine Mitchell from the CDL Publishing & Access Group for help on this post.
