The UC Libraries has announced new campus-based open access (OA) fund pilots to support UC faculty members who wish to make their research findings immediately and freely available to the public. Funded in part by the California Digital Library (CDL), these new OA funds will help pay the article processing charges for UC authors who want to make their articles available via OA publishing.
OA literature is free, online and available to anyone. An OA article has limited copyright and licensing restrictions which means anyone, anywhere, with access to the Internet may read, download, copy and distribute that article. The business models for some OA journals shifts the cost of publication from subscriptions to authors by charging the author an article processing fee.
In many fields, particularly the sciences, that fee is then charged to a research grant. Recognising that not all scholars have grant monies to draw on, the CDL has collaborated with UC campus libraries to develop this pilot programme.
