“Community over Commercialization” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 23-29). This theme encourages conversation around approaches to open scholarship that prioritize the interests of the research community and the public. Researchers have many options for publishing their work: from large commercial publishers to locally-supported, scholar-led open access platforms.
The University of California libraries invest in numerous not-for-profit open access and open infrastructure initiatives that enable authors to publish their work openly without incurring any author-based fees. These “diamond” open access resources are increasing in number as the research and academic communities seek scholar-led alternatives to high cost article processing and book processing charges (APCs and BPCs).
eScholarship – Open Access Publications from the University of California
Many UCSF researchers are familiar with eScholarship as the platform for depositing final versions of their scholarly article manuscripts as protected by UC’s Open Access Policies. But eScholarship is also home to close to 100 journals for the University of California academic community.
eScholarship Publishing is a comprehensive open access publishing program that offers publishing and production tools as well as professional support and consulting services for journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and other UC-affiliated original scholarship. The majority of journals do not charge APCs.
See the full list of journals on eScholarship, including Western Journal of Emergency Medicine.
Open scholarship investments
The California Digital Library also invests in numerous open scholarship resources in support of UC research, scholarship, and teaching. The UCSF Library does not bear the cost for the following resources. They are paid for from a pooled fund established to support the needs of the UC collective and to improve system-wide support for open scholarship.
Here’s a sampling of the community-funded open resources that UC helps support:
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – a multi-disciplinary index of vetted open access journals from around the world. DOAJ indexes close to 20,000 journals, of which 13,000 do not charge APCs.
- Open Library of Humanities – an academic-led publisher of 28 peer-reviewed humanities journals with no fees. OLH developed the open source publishing platform, Janeway, which is used by eScholarship and several university presses.
- The MIT Press – Direct to Open (D2O) – a collective model enabling free worldwide access to 40 scholarly monographs and edited collections published in 2023. Sample title: War on All Fronts: A Theory of Health Security Justice.
- OEN (Open Education Network) – a not-for-profit started at the University of Minnesota to support open textbooks, and specifically the Open Textbook Library
- SciPost – an open repository publishing infrastructure managed by scientists, which includes innovations such as “peer-witnessed refereeing,” a form of open peer review.
Learn more
See additional University of California open investments from fiscal year 2022-23.
Check out more information on open access, and contact the Library with questions.