May 17, 2022
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New Open Access agreement between the University of California, the California State University, members of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium, and the American Chemical Society
As of May 17, 2022, the University of California (UC), together with the California State University (CSU) and members of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), entered into a transformative open access agreement with the American Chemical Society (ACS), the first such California-wide agreement.
The three-year agreement provides readers and researchers at nearly 60 California research institutions – including all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – with access to subscription content while allowing authors at the participating institutions to publish open access in ACS’ portfolio of over 75 chemistry journals at a reduced cost.
The agreement is a collaboration between both research-intensive and read-intensive institutions and an example of how a multi-party deal can make transformative agreements more sustainable for institutions with diverse needs. As the scholarly publishing industry transitions towards an open access future, innovations like this partnership will be crucial to ensuring that all educational institutions and their researchers can participate in the full benefits of open access publication.
The goal of the agreement is to enable authors from UC, CSU, and SCELC institutions to transition from the traditional ”read-only” subscription model to a transformative model that makes it easier and more affordable for authors to publish open access. As with UC’s other transformative agreements, the agreement supports UC’s mission as a public university and advances the global shift toward sustainable open access publishing by making more UC- authored research articles open to the world, while containing the university’s journal-related expenditures.
ACS is the fourth largest publisher of scholarly journal articles by researchers in the UC system, which includes 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Making it easier and more affordable for those researchers to publish open access brings a potential for expanded visibility to their important scientific discoveries. As the institutions involved collectively publish more than 11% of the nation's scholarly journal articles and deliver instruction to more than 1 million California students, the impact of this agreement will be felt widely in the chemistry community.
The agreement runs from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2025, and covers open access publishing in the American Chemical Society’s hybrid (subscription-based) and fully open access journals. It includes all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For more detail about the agreement please see the overview of the American Chemical Society Open Access agreement.
If you have any questions, please contact the UCSB Library Scholarly Communication Support Team at openaccess@library.ucsb.edu.