Graduate Student Research Support

This page provides an overview of open access and the publishing landscape, including predatory publishers, as well as some basic information on publishing as an UC author. For more comprehensive information on publishing as a UC author, please see the:

Open access scholarly publications are, as Peter Suber describes them, “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions,” and they may be available at a publisher’s website or placed in a repository by an author.

Open access removes barriers between readers and scholarly publications: open access works are read more, have higher download rates, and are accessed more broadly than their subscription/sales counterparts. Public service also lies at the heart of the University of California’s mission, and providing broad access to the university’s research output is a way to give back to the public and to demonstrate the value of academic work.

Increasingly, higher education institutions are investing in ensuring the broad distribution of their researchers’ work via open access licensing agreements with commercial publishers, institution-based or library-based open access publishing programs, and the adoption and implementation of wide-ranging open access policies.

UC's Academic Senate and administrative leaders strive to uphold the university’s core values and policies, including:

• Free and open access to UC research: Open access publishing supports UC’s public service mission by ensuring people across California and around the world can learn from and build on the university’s research and scholarly work.
• Responsible stewardship of state funds: As a public university system, UC is committed to containing the rapidly rising costs associated with scholarly journals and making the transition to open access financially sustainable.
• Protecting author rights: UC believes that authors should retain copyright in their work. They should be able to share and reuse their own research publications and data without permission from or payment to the publisher.

As a result, the UC has worked with numerous vendors and publishers to negotiate agreements to support open access publishing. The typical model was to pay a large subscription fee to access content from publishers and vendors. Transformative agreements are working to change that model.

Read more about UC policies here:

The University of California is committed to making it easier and more affordable for UC authors to publish open access. 

The UC libraries negotiate agreements with scholarly journal publishers to reduce the amount authors must pay when they choose to publish open access. Most agreements offer up to full coverage of the open access fees; others offer a discount. 

Find details on the amount of funding available to UC authors, by publisher, below. Both full coverage and discount agreements are listed.

eScholarship is the institutional repository for the University of California, for faculty, staff and students, including undergraduates to deposit and post their creative output.  These FAQs and information links will take you to additional explanations and resources about specific issues:

Talking Points or FAQs:

1. Get a Waiver, Embargo, or Addendum for your Publisher  
2. Legal issues and supporting documentation - Copyright and Legal Agreements - http://escholarship.org/help_copyright.html
3. Publishing Options - Postprint Hints - http://www.escholarship.org/publish_postprints_hints.html 
4. How to retain author's rights? - Sample Addendum to Retain Author's Rights - http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/manage/retain_copyrights.html
5. How to treat revised documents or how to remove them from eScholarship? - Removing and Revising Publications - http://escholarship.org/help_removing.html
6. Sample Addendum to Retain Author's Rights - http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/manage/retain_copyrights.html