In June, UC Santa Cruz joined its sister UC campuses in taking an important step towards the goal of making all scholarly journal literature freely available to the world by endorsing the international open access (OA) initiative, OA2020. Led by the Max Planck Digital Library, OA2020 is a global alliance committed to new models of scholarly publishing that ensure outputs are open and re-usable and that the costs behind their dissemination are transparent and economically sustainable.
By adding its name to the list of 136 signatory organizations, UC Santa Cruz demonstrates its strong commitment to the values the UC Academic Senate has held since the adoption of its Open Access Policy in 2013. Further, it emphasizes the campus’s support of the Senate-wide UCOLASC’s Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication and the UC Systemwide Library And Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC) call to action aimed at transforming how the UC Libraries approach journal negotiations.
"People here at UCSC produce such amazing work, it's great to move toward making it open access to allow everyone to learn about it," said Karen Otteman, chair of the campus Senate Committee on Scholarly Communication.
University Librarian Elizabeth Cowell added, “As UCSC community members are aware, the costs of scholarly publishing are unsustainable. Access to content needed to conduct research is becoming more difficult for campus libraries to afford. As a member of the UC system, one of the largest producers of scholarly research, it is critical that we support international initiatives like OA 2020.”
At UCSC, we are actively engaged in efforts to improve the economics of scholarly publishing and increase the visibility and impact of our scholars’ work through our collaboration with the California Digital Library, SC-COLASC, SLASIAC, and UCOLASC. The most recent product of these efforts is the UC Libraries’ three-year open access agreement with Cambridge University Press. The transformative agreement with CUP gives the UC access to over 400 academic journals and provide authors within the UC system opportunities for open access publishing in Cambridge’s academic journals.
UC Santa Cruz publicly endorsing the OA 2020 initiative demonstrates UC’s commitment to and role in leading the change in scholarly publishing.
