Last month, the University of California announced its support for AB 609, a bill in the California legislature that would require state-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public no later than 12 months after initial publication, a sensible step to provide the public what it paid for.
A policy under review by the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, a committee of the UC Academic Senate, would create a centralized repository focused specifically on the UC system. However, while the UC policy has been sitting in the review process for about 18 months, researchers are contracting away their licensing rights by submitting their research manuscripts for publication in subscription journals.
Since the UC cannot make the policy retroactive, meaning it cannot include previous research publications already contracted to closed-access journals, it is imperative for this policy to be passed and implemented as soon as possible.
Traditionally, subscription journals of various disciplines such as Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine have made research from all fields available to the public at a price.
When a publishing company enters into a contract with a researcher, the license – the ability to use or disseminate the intellectual property – is given to only the publisher for an extended period of time, and the publishers solely can decide how flexible or restrictive the reproduction of the materials can be.
Many faculty members across the UC system support the movement to expand access to their work, said Christopher Kelty, a UCLA associate professor of information studies and chairman of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.
The UC policy under review would make all research materials by UC faculties freely available through an online repository with certain restrictions, regardless of whether the research was funded by the state or federal government.
There is also a bill circulating in Congress, called the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, representing the broader federal effort to freely disseminate research information to the public.
“I would venture to say under 10 percent are California funded,” said Kelty.
If that is the case, only a small portion of research output at the UC would be affected by the state policy. Additionally, the state and federal bills would establish separate and complicated bureaucracies to collect all research materials from across the country and the state. The UC policy, however, would make research results more easily accessible to the public.
The UC initiative follows the model of the open access policy UC San Francisco adopted last year, Kelty said.
The systemwide policy would require faculty members to submit an electronic manuscript of their published work to a central UC repository. Faculty that already have contracts with specific publications can ask that the UC not collect the manuscripts until the established contracts allow them to do so.
Given that the UC has a billion dollars of research funding entering the system per year, expanding access and centralizing storage at the UC would set a firm precedent in opening research to public and general use, following in the footsteps of private institutions such as Harvard’s and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s transition to a completely open access research environment.
However, the UC proposal has languished for more than a year in the review process.
Undergraduate and graduate student government across all UC campuses should show their support for open and unfettered access to the University’s research in order to encourage the UC Office of the President to move forward with the proposed policy.
Even though this policy is in the general interest of the public, which funds research at schools like UCLA, publishing companies must worry about their bottom line.
Pushing for open access is not to understate the importance of publishing companies – they play a vital role in mediating the peer-review process and editing research manuscripts.
The publishing process of a scholarly article is a complicated one: The authors who write the articles submit them to the publishers, who mediate the peer-review process by choosing a group of academic reviewers to look over the draft. After rounds of edits, the accepted manuscripts are then published electronically and in print.
The UC policy takes the role the publishers play as mediators into account and proposes an embargo period – a time frame of six to 12 months – before researchers are required to submit their final, edited electronic manuscripts to the repository.
The embargo period is intended to protect some elements of the subscription model by allowing immediate paid access.
The UC system must put in place open access policies as soon as possible in order to remain a leader in research and fulfill its role of public service for the California community by making its research and findings broadly accessible.
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