Scholarly Communication & Open Access

On March 16, the University of California announced a transformative open access agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.

We’re delighted to announce that UC authors can now make research they publish in The Company of Biologists, The Royal Society, and Canadian Science Publishing freely available for anyone to read by taking advantage of the university’s new transformative open access agreement with the publisher. All three agreements cover both hybrid and open access journals.

After a career at UCSB spanning more than two decades, librarian Sherri Barnes retired at the end of January. She led the Library to the forefront of the movement for open access research as the Library's first Scholarly Communication Program Coordinator, her most recent role.

Throughout her time at the UCSB Library, Barnes has also served as subject librarian for Feminist Studies, LGBT Studies, and U.S. History, while also serving as Humanities Collection Coordinator.

UC Santa Barbara librarian Angela Chikowero has been selected to the 2020-21 cohort for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Education Leadership Program.

Officially launched November 1, 2019, COPIM (Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is a three-year project organized around six interlinking work packages.

The University of California announced June 16 that it reached a transformative open access agreement with Springer Nature, the world's second-largest academic publisher.

The agreement - the largest open access agreement in North America to date - is the first for Springer Nature and signals increasing global momentum and support for the open access movement. 

In January, the University of California announced an agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society - to make it easier for UC authors to publish open access in ACM journals, conferences, and magazines. The workflow for the agreement went into effect on May 13, 2020.

The University of California (UC) and the nonprofit open access publisher, Public Library of Science (PLoS), have entered an agreement, effective April 1, that will make it more affordable for UC authors to publish in one of the PLoS journals.

You’re invited to join UCSB Library in celebrating Fair Use Week 2020 by visiting the information table in the Library Paseo from noon to 1 p.m. Feb. 24-28. 

Fair Use Week is an international event coordinated annually by the Association of Research Libraries that celebrates and explores fair use rights under the copyright statute. 

With a new quarter and new year underway, you may be curious about the status of the University of California’s negotiations with Elsevier, which stalled last year.

Since then, there has been progress with other publishers as UC works to advance open access to its research.

Here’s what you need to know about UC’s latest open access efforts.