OA Week – How UC San Diego Library Supports Open Access

Here are four key ways the UC San Diego Library (and UC Libraries as a whole) supports open access for faculty, students and staff. Please contact Allegra Swift, our Scholarly Communications Librarian, if you would like more information about any of these or need further assistance. Contact: scholcomm@ucsd.edu.

  • Financial Support for Publishing Scholarly Monographs with UC Press/Luminos
  • APC Discounts/Waivers to Publish in Full or Hybrid Open Access Journals
  • Supporting Open Access Monographs with Knowledge Unlatched
  • UC Open Access Policies and Support for Depositing Articles into eScholarship

Details on each are below the jump.

Financial Support for Publishing Scholarly Monographs with UC Press/Luminos
Luminos is the University of California Press’s OA platform. They use the same selection and review processes they do with all their scholarly monographs, but with a cost sharing model to support the open access publication of these humanities and social science monographs. The Library’s membership helps support this transformative publishing model. UC Press calculates the cost of OA monograph publishing at approximately $15,000. The author’s contribution for University of California faculty, books based on UC dissertations, and books in series where the editor is UC faculty is $5,000, which the Library will fully cover for UC San Diego authors’ accepted books.

APC Discounts to Publish in Full or Hybrid Open Access Journals
Through the Library’s various subscriptions and memberships, UC San Diego authors can get discounts on some publisher APCs, or even waive the full APC with some publishers like the Electrochemical Society. APCs, also known as “article processing charges,” are the fees journal publishers charge to make articles open access–freely available at the publisher website. Some journals are fully open access, while other journals are a mix of OA and paywalled articles (aka hybrid journals).
The list of UC-wide APC discounts and waivers will tell you what the discount is for each publisher, and what are the conditions. For example, some policies apply if any of the authors on your paper are from UC, while others may specify that the corresponding author must be UC-affiliated. Along with these, UC San Diego has local APC discounts/waivers with PeerJ, Cogitatio Press, and MDPI.

Supporting Open Access Online Monographs with Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is a program to make scholarly humanities and social science monographs freely available. UC San Diego and other libraries pledge funds to “unlatch” these books. You can see what KU books are currently in our collection, mostly from university presses.
We have also recently pledged to support Language Science Press (for open access linguistics monographs), and a collection of 21 humanities journals that will be open access and APC-free. Next year KU will announce their first collection of OA STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) titles.

UC Open Access Policies Support for Depositing Articles into eScholarship
Whether you are a faculty member covered by the Academic Senate Open Access policy, or a UC employee (lecturers, postdocs, grad students, non-senate researchers, etc). otherwise covered by the Presidential Open Access Policy, the Library can assist you with making sure that your scholarly articles are freely available to the public, while still complying with your publisher agreements.
This includes:

  1. Helping you determine which versions of your articles can be deposited into eScholarship, the UCs open access repository, and which ones are already available through another open access repository like PubMed Central.
  2. Assisting you with the actual deposit process, whether it’s through the Publication Management System (Senate-represented faculty) or directly into eScholarship (everyone else).