Anneliese Taylor
Anneliese Taylor
Anneliese is the Head of Scholarly Communication. Contact Anneliese for help evaluating journals and publishers, assessing research impact, and for scholarly publishing resources.

Publish Open Access with ACM, Microbiology Society, and NAR

We’re pleased to announce three new publisher agreements that went into effect recently that make publishing open access more affordable for UCSF corresponding authors. Wide dissemination of UC authorship through open access publishing is a core goal for transitioning library-publisher agreements outlined by UC faculty, libraries, and administration. Two of these agreements are with society publishers — the Association for Computing Machinery and the Microbiology Society — and the third is for articles in Nucleic Acids Research, published by the Oxford University Press.

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

For all UC corresponding authors, open access (OA) is now the default publication option for research and review articles in any ACM journal, conference, or magazine. This is made possible through an institutionally prepaid publishing agreement. There is no payment necessary by the author because through this agreement UC is paying ACM a single bulk fee to cover both UC article publication costs and subscription access to the ACM Digital Library. The pilot agreement runs from January 2020 through December 31, 2022, and applies to manuscripts submitted and articles published during that period.  Authors can opt out of the OA arrangement and publish behind a paywall if they so choose. Read the summary about this agreement and find additional details via the frequently asked questions.

The Microbiology Society

UCSF corresponding authors publishing in Microbiology Society journals can now select open access (OA) at no cost to the author. As of 2020, the UCSF Library’s payment covers both ‘read’ access to subscription content as well as OA publication in journals published by the Society, including Journal of General Virology and Journal of Medical Microbiology. When submitting your manuscript to any of the Society’s journals, use your @ucsf.edu email address so the publisher recognizes your affiliation with a ‘Publish and Read institution‘. Authors will be asked to sign a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for publishing their article OA without further charge, and without embargo. Authors retain the right to opt out of publishing their articles as OA. There are no caps on the number of articles that are covered.  

Nucleic Acids Research (NAR)

As of 2020, UCSF corresponding authors are entitled to a 50% discount off the standard open access article processing charge (APC) for publishing in the journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR). Since 1974, NAR has published the results of leading edge research into physical, chemical, biochemical and biological aspects of nucleic acids and proteins involved in nucleic acid metabolism and/or interactions. Published by Oxford University Press, NAR transitioned to an open access model from a subscription model in 2005. UCSF recently became an institutional member of NAR, thereby providing the 50% discount.

When a manuscript is accepted for publication, authors will be notified of the institutional membership. If the discount is not automatically included, contact the Author Support team at jnls.author.support@oup.com to confirm the membership and have the discount applied. Find out more via the UC Office of Scholarly Communication.

Additional OA Publishing Discounts

Additional open access publishing discounts are available to UCSF through a number of publisher agreements. See all available discounts.

Have a question? Contact Scholarly Communication support at the Library.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash