Another Open Source Deal

Blog readers will recall the UC dispute with academic journal publisher Elsevier that eventually resulted in a deal to allow open source access.* Another such deal has been reached with a publisher. From the Daily Cal:

The University of California announced open access agreements with academic journals under Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, and Springer Nature’s Nature portfolio to provide open-access scientific journals. According to Jeff MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley university librarian, with the addition of these two agreements, the university has now secured 15 “transformative” agreements, reaching a milestone regarding open access that has been pursued since 2018.

“The UC is a public institution, and most of its research is funded by the public,” MacKie-Mason said in an email. “This advances the UC’s mission to better the world through its research, and it speeds up the rate at which new discoveries can be shared and can improve lives across the globe.”

Both Springer Nature and IEEE are large publishers of UC research, according to MacKie-Mason. With Springer Nature’s Nature portfolio now under open access, according to MacKie-Mason, the university libraries are converting all the money that was being spent to read articles in the Nature journals into money to support authors who want to publish open-access articles in the journals. MacKie-Mason said the open-access agreement with IEEE is even more significant because in addition to converting subscription spending into publishing spending, the library will pay three-quarters of the total cost of university author open access publishing in IEEE journals.

“If authors wish their research to be freely read (that is, at no cost to the reader) across the world, the UC libraries will use their resources to help make that happen,” MacKie-Mason said in the email. “Authors can still choose to publish subscription-only (that is, requiring readers to pay), but it is a policy of the UC Academic Senate and of the UC president to move as quickly as we can to publishing all research open access.”

If an author does not opt out, their article will be published open access, so university libraries and authors will split the cost of publication. In the case of the new IEEE agreement, university libraries will pay the full cost of publishing if the author does not have sufficient funds, according to MacKie-Mason. They added that the IEEE agreement took effect July 15 and the Spring Nature agreement took effect Aug. 1...

Full story at https://www.dailycal.org/2022/08/02/uc-announces-open-access-deals-with-nature-ieee-journals/.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-elsevier-deal.html.