University Library

The library could pay your open access journal fees!

Open Access

A new pilot fund, sponsored by the California Digital Library and the UCSC University Librarian, supports UCSC faculty members, lecturers, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.  The goals of the fund are to advance the impact of, and increase access to, UCSC research and scholarship; to support innovative models of scholarly publishing; and to aid UCSC faculty, students, and staff who want to publish in open-access journals but who do not have other sources of funding to cover article-processing fees.  

 

The fund provides UCSC authors reimbursement:

  • up to $3000/article for open access fees for those publishing in full open access journals. Some examples include PLOS journals in the sciences (particularly biology and medicine) and SAGE Open in social sciences and humanities.
  • up to $1500/article for paid access fees in hybrid journals(a hybrid journal is a traditional subscription-based journal that offers authors an option to pay an additional fee to make the article available to the public.)

To learn more about open access, and to find out how to apply, visit the UC Open Access Fund website.

Benefits of Open Access

1. More readers and more citations to your articles. Research has shown that open access articles get cited more. Traditional publishing models make money by charging those who can afford to pay for access. Colleagues at institutions that have cancelled their subscription to the journal you're publishing in (or who couldn't afford it in the first place) will have a much harder time finding and reading your work if it is not open access. As library budgets around the world continue to shrink, fewer and fewer people will have access to articles that are only available to subscribers. 

2. Public good. Open access literature can be read not only by scholars at non-subscribing institutions, but by medical practitioners, high school students, employees of private industry, taxpayers who may have helped fund it - anyone with an internet connection. Open access work has greater potential to further knowledge and innovation around the world.

3. Shifting business models in the scholarly publishing industry.Scholars write and review articles for journals; journal publishers do not pay them for this work, but they do charge the scholars' institutions subscriptions - sometimes extremely expensive ones. For-profit publishers are still reporting operating profit margins between 30 and 45%, while campus budgets shrink. Meanwhile, nonprofit publishers are demonstrating great value, online publishing presents new technological possibilities, and authors are starting to pay more attention to the power they hold in the system. This is a time of rapid and unpredictable change in scholarly publishing. Open access is only one piece of the puzzle of a more efficient system, but it's an important one.