The University of California issued a policy Monday that will allow all scholarly articles written by UC researchers to be freely shared with anyone who wants to access them.
The Presidential Open Access Policy will allow University authors to make their research publicly available in the UC’s open access database eScholarship unless they obtain a waiver, according to a UC Office of Scholarly Communication press release. Authors can grant rights to their work to the University prior to making any agreements with outside publishers.
The policy will also enable authors to publish their work in journals outside the UC database, according to the press release. Publishers formerly had exclusive control of the distribution.
The UC Academic Senate, which mostly consists of tenure-track faculty, passed a policy in 2013 that made scholarly articles written by its members freely available.
With the new policy, about 30,000 academic appointees, such as adjunct professors, lecturers, post-doctoral students and clinical researchers, can also make their work accessible to the public, said Christopher Kelty, chair of the Presidential Open Access Policy Task Force and an information studies and anthropology professor at UCLA, in an email.
The UC system is responsible for over 2 percent of the world’s total research publications, according to the press release.
Compiled by Shreya Maskara, Bruin senior staff.