Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, and the University of California (UC) have signed a ground-breaking memorandum of understanding to support open access (OA) publishing across the 10-campus UC system.
Elsevier aims to find the right solutions to meet the diverse needs of academic institutions, researchers and funders around the world, while ensuring published research remains trusted and high quality.
The four-year agreement pilots UC’s pioneering shared funding model at an unprecedented scale and will support UC’s libraries, funders and authors to increase open access publishing while also enabling all UC researchers to read Elsevier’s extensive portfolio of journals.
This agreement has the potential to support sustainable open access for the future, in particular for a highly research-intensive university such as UC and helps deliver the University’s goal of securing open access to UC research.
As part of the agreement, Elsevier will implement UC’s shared funding model utilizing the company’s leading publishing systems which enable funding from multiple sources such as library budgets, funder grants and researcher funds.
It also presents an opportunity to better understand and learn from author adoption, helping progress open access publishing at UC and beyond.
Ivy Anderson, Associate Executive Director of the California Digital Library, and co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team said: “UC strives to support all scholars who wish to publish their findings open access, and this agreement marks a significant step toward that goal. We came a long way together to reach an agreement that will enable all UC research published in Elsevier to be freely available.”
Gino Ussi, Executive Vice President Research Solutions said: “Our agreement with UC delivers a real win for the world-class researchers across the UC system, supporting them to publish open access and read high quality, trusted research by others in Elsevier journals. The collaboration and flexibility from both sides led to a truly tailored approach, based on the needs of the research-intensive UC community, so that we can test and learn from author choices and enable a sustainable transition to open access for UC research.”
This agreement is the latest in a series of open access pilots Elsevier has launched with universities across the US and around the world. Elsevier is testing and learning from these agreements, enabling us to work with our partners to provideresearchers and institutions around the world with choices that meet their diverse needs.
In 2020 Elsevier published 81,000 open access articles, up 65 percent from 2019, making the company one of the largest open access publishers in the world. Nearly all of Elsevier’s 2,600 journals now enable OA publishing. For more on how Elsevier supports open access, please visit our website.
