The University of California (UC) announced a two-year open access agreement with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that makes it easier and more affordable for corresponding authors at UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to publish open access articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This is the first transformative agreement between PNAS and a U.S. research institution, and UC’s tenth open access publishing agreement.
The two-year pilot agreement, which runs from August 2021 to July 2023, enables authors across the UC system to publish with immediate open access in PNAS at a lower total cost and with no separate article page charges. A flat annual fee covered by the UC libraries provides read access to PNAS at UC institutions and subsidizes the decreased cost of open access publishing for UC authors.
Students and researchers at all UC campuses will also be able to access all PNAS content, dating back to 1915, free of charge. The official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS publishes research in the biological, physical, and social sciences from the U.S. and around the world.
The agreement represents a significant step toward the overall goal of the NAS and other society publishers to develop sustainable open access models for scientific publishing. It also supports the university’s goal of working with publishers of all types and sizes to advance free and open access to UC research, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output.
PNAS is one of the world’s most widely cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, publishing more than 3,500 research papers annually. As the official journal of the NAS, PNAS is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is global in scope, with submission open to researchers worldwide. Since its establishment in 1914, PNAS has worked to publish high-quality scientific research and to make that research accessible to a broad audience.