UC Office of Scholarly Communication

do you put your author's final version in https://escholarship.org ? Do you ever use https://oapolicy.universityofcalifornia.edu/ ? (it's only open to senate faculty right now, be we are rolling it out for all ~240k UC employees) Also related https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu (disclosure, I'm the nominal tech lead for these)

I think this will be an important link to give context to this development: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-neg… - No matter what happens moving forward, UC scholars will still be able to use ScienceDirect to access most articles published prior to January 1, 2019 because UC has permanent access rights to them. (Please see the Alternative Access to Articles page for a list of titles to which UC does not have permanent access rights and for information on how to access items UC does not subscribe to.) - If access is disrupted at any point, the UC Libraries will still work with researchers to get them the articles they need through other means, such as interlibrary loan. - Our quick guide to alternative access provides an overview of the options available to UC researchers. ________ - If the negotiations are successful, UC’s proposed model will make it easier and more affordable for UC faculty to publish their work as open access in Elsevier journals. - No matter what happens, UC authors retain the right to publish in the journal of their choice. - By providing article processing charge (APC) support through the UC Libraries as well as an opt-out option, UC is working hard to ensure that authors have maximum flexibility in determining where and how they want to publish.

Harvard and the University of California already have done this. I am not sure how widespread it is. "In 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to give the University a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. In the years since, the remaining eight Harvard schools voted similar open-access (OA) policies; as of late 2015, three research centers have joined their number." [1] "The University of California is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, as a public university system, the University of California is dedicated to making its scholarship available to the people of California. Furthermore, the University of California recognizes the benefits that accrue to its authors as individual scholars and to the scholarly enterprise from such wide dissemination, including greater recognition, more thorough review, consideration, and critique, and a general increase in scientific, scholarly, and critical knowledge. The University of California further recognizes that by such policies, authors of scholarly articles can more easily and collectively reserve rights that might otherwise be signed away, often unnecessarily, in agreements with publishers. To accomplish this, authors take advantage of US copyright law to grant to the University a non-exclusive license (limited to the purpose of making the work openly available) for each scholarly…

Thanks! Though I have to say, credit for the open access is entirely due to librarians of the UC system. I just had to click a button saying I wanted it to be made available. The work was already done via this 2019 agreement with Cambridge: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/camb…

https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/else… "All Cell Press and Lancet journals are part of the UC agreement. For these top journals, UC’s shared funding model — where the libraries share the cost of open access publishing with authors — will be phased in, with all Cell Press and Lancet journals integrated no later than 2023, midway through the four-year agreement." "a limited number of societies that partner with Elsevier for their publishing have chosen to exclude their journals from transformative agreements, so their journals are not eligible for either reading, publishing, or both under the agreement. A list of these exclusions will be available soon and linked from this page."

Article is from February 2020 although not much seems to have changed since https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/uc-a…

More details at: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/spri… In short: - Runs 2020-2023 - 2020: OA publishing for no author fee - 2021: Libraries pay $1000 as part of cost-sharing for article processing charge; if author can't pay the rest, library will cover - 2022: Nature & NPG journals start to become part of the agreement

Pretty sure it's hyperbole. Here's the page linked to from the OP, "Access to Elsevier Articles", that mentions (only) the first line in the quote above. [0] https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-neg…

According to the linked statement from the UC Office of Scholarly Communications [1], "No matter what happens moving forward, UC scholars will still be able to use ScienceDirect to access most articles published prior to January 1, 2019 because UC has permanent access rights to them." [1] https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-neg… Edit: dannykwells beat me to it, and in more detail.

See UC's Office of Scholarly Communication's guide to "Alternative Access to Elsevier Articles." It looks like UC actually had a license which granted them perpetual licensing rights to most existing content? Or "post termination access rights" in the language of the post. https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-neg…

While Nature publishes articles that poke at Elsevier, they might themselves want to explain to us why they are the largest requestor of waivers to UC's Open Access policy, by almost a factor of 8: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/open-access-p… It would seem to me that they're not exactly an unbiased spectator on the matter of publishers and access.

That is actually true in the US as well with NIH funded research [1] (the majority of biomedical research). HOWEVER, the research need only be opened after a time-embargo (generally a year). Additionally larger universities like the University of California system also 'require' open access publication [2] - however waivers to that requirement are often sought and easily granted. In both cases, the policies (NIH in 2009, UC system in 2013) were shots across the bows of the large publishers, and permit a gradual easing of the culture without just blowing it up. So long as the eventual goal of all open-access is met in a relatively timely fashion, I think the strategy of slowly cinching down the rule is a reasonable compromise. [1] https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm [2] https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/index.html

>What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. The University of California has already done this.* Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.* * http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking-president…

They're becoming more common. The entire University of California system already has a similar policy, of institutional open-access archival by default, but with a waiver process for a handful of cases where the author thinks it's needed: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/

It depends on the circumstances and the publisher. In many cases publishers permit authors to host the accepted version of the paper (but not the final version that includes revisions based on reviewer feedback) on their personal/institutional website and to email copies of the paper on an individual basis to people who request them. For example, see https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright (under "Author Rights") for what Elsevier permits you to do with your own work. On the other hand, publishers have sometimes filed lawsuits against sites where authors share their papers, e.g. ResearchGate: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06945-6 Elsevier have also sent takedown notices to universities where academics have made the final version available on their institutional websites: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/19/how-one-p… https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2013/12/elsevier-takedown-notic… https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/elsevier-takedown-noti… https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/01/28/setting-the-record…