The University Library at UC Berkeley has signed the OA2020 Expression of Interest, in collaboration with UC Davis and UC San Francisco. OA2020 is an international movement, led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, to convert the entire corpus of scholarly journal literature to open access by the year 2020.
Open access promotes free, immediate access to research articles and the rights to use these articles to advance knowledge worldwide. OA2020 is a framework to achieve open access, and one solution for the rising costs of subscription journals and the need for reduced barriers in accessing and reusing information.
When an institution joins the OA2020 movement, it agrees to make a good faith effort to devise and implement practical strategies and actions for attaining universal open access for scholarly journal literature. OA2020 provides the flexibility for institutions to define for themselves how they will repurpose their journal subscription funds to support open access publishing.
The UC Berkeley Library has long been a pioneer in assisting authors with open access publishing, and was one of the first institutions in the nation to create a fund (the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative) that subsidises article processing charges so that Berkeley scholars can publish for greater impact, and be read by policy-makers and researchers around the globe. Since 2008, the University Library has supported nearly 300 open access articles from more than 250 unique authors from nearly every division and numerous disciplines on campus.
The particular models that will form the basis for Berkeley's transition to open access will be articulated in an OA2020 campus roadmap that the Library is developing in consultation with key stakeholders. The Library has posted an early draft of this roadmap on an OA2020 project website created by the now four U.S. signatory campuses.
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