A great development for the Open Educational Resources movement out of the UC system:
By Jennifer Howard
After years of discussion, the University of California’s Academic Senate has adopted an open-access policy that will make research articles freely available to the public through eScholarship, California’s open digital repository.The new policy, to be phased in over the next few months, applies to all 10 of the system’s campuses and more than 8,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty members. It will affect as many as 40,000 research papers a year, the university said in a statement announcing the news. Faculty members can opt out or ask that their work be embargoed for a period of time, as many journal publishers require.
In a departure from many other institutions’ open-access policies, researchers will also be able to make their work available under commercial as well as noncommercial Creative Commons licenses.
More than 175 universities have preceded California in endorsing open access, but the huge research footprint of the California system gives its action extra significance. University of California researchers get an estimated 8 percent of all U.S. research money, according to the system’s announcement, and produce 2 percent to 3 percent of peer-reviewed scholarly articles published worldwide every year. Read more.
