The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public. The move is projected to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.
The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the US to adopt an open access (OA) policy and among the first public universities to do so.
UCSF is the US’ largest public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year, valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, a majority of these papers are only available to subscribers who pay subscription fees. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals.
Such restrictions and costs have been cited among the obstacles in translating scientific advances from laboratory research into improved clinical care.
The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an OA repository, thereby providing access to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national OA repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or published as OA publications. They will then be available to be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.
Under terms negotiated with the NIH, some of the premier journals only allow open access in PubMed Central one year after publication; prior to that only the titles and summaries of articles are freely available. How such journals will handle the UCSF policy remains to be seen.
The UCSF policy gives the university a nonexclusive licence to distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in scientific or medical journals. Researchers are able to ‘opt out’ if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy.
The UCSF vote was the result of a faculty-led initiative, and makes it the first campus in the UC system to implement such a policy. It has been developed in collaboration with other UC campuses and systemwide committees, especially the UC Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, with the ultimate goal of implementing the policy across all ten UC campuses.
