The University of California and Wiley today announced an innovative one-year open access agreement pilot for 2022 that will make more of the University’s research available to read and share worldwide.
The agreement brings together UC, which generates nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output, and Wiley, which publishes nearly 2,000 peer-reviewed journals, to advance a sustainable transition to open access.
Under the pilot agreement, which covers articles published from January 1 to December 31, 2022, Wiley will make open access the first-choice option for articles by authors at five UC campuses — Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. For authors at those five campuses who publish in Wiley journals, the UC libraries will automatically cover the first $1,000 of the article publication charge (APC) and authors will be asked to pay the balance; those who do not have research funds available can request full funding of the APC from the libraries. The pilot allows UC and Wiley to test new processes and models and will help with product development before exploring potential future expansion to the entire UC system.
Additionally, corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will receive a discount on APCs when publishing open access in Wiley journals.
“The University of California is a pioneer when it comes to open access, and we are eager to begin this partnership in the joint pursuit of a more open research ecosystem,” said Liz Ferguson, Senior Vice President, Wiley Research Publishing. “We are delighted to be working together with this group to develop new transformational agreement models and processes that could have a wider application across the world.”
The agreement covers disciplines across Wiley’s broad portfolio, supporting rapid dissemination of research from the social sciences and humanities to life and health sciences, physical sciences and engineering. UC researchers publishing in prestigious journals, including flagship titles from the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Chemistry Europe, the American Cancer Society, and the Advanced series of titles, will benefit from increased visibility for their latest research.
“This pilot agreement will make it more affordable for UC authors to publish open access with Wiley, a significant publisher for UC,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, University Librarian, Chief Digital Scholarship Officer, and Professor at UC Berkeley and co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team. “We welcome the opportunity presented by this pilot to explore how UC and Wiley can work together to achieve UC’s aim of open access to its scholarship.”
Open access is a rapidly growing publishing model that allows peer-reviewed articles to be read, shared and re-used immediately, allowing faster knowledge transfer and application of important research results into new technologies, therapies, public policy, and beyond. Research published under the agreement will be accessible without barriers, enabling a wider dissemination of information among academics and the public alike, at a time when public health, environmental challenges, food and energy security, and a host of pressing, global issues require evidence-based solutions rooted in science.
