Open access publishing is an ongoing effort to secure the intellectual and creative output of a community and to avoid what many see as profiting and fraud. Just recently, the University of California has joined global efforts pushing for universal, unfettered access to publicly funded research. This interesting news came to us from the Santa Barbara Independent in their article, “UCs Move Foward with Open-Access Publishing.”
Some scholarly publishing corporations use their ownership rights to maximize profit while libraries, universities, and research institutions across the globe have advocated for open-access publishing. The majority of research is still placed behind expensive paywalls. The University of California Office of the President announced that it will be ending their subscription with Elsevier, the world’s largest for-profit scientific publisher.
The 10 University of California campuses account for nearly 10 percent of all scholarly publishing output in the United States. There are many financial models for open access publications. Open access can be provided by commercial publishers, who may publish open access as well as subscription-based journals, or dedicated open-access publishers such as Public Library of Science and BioMed Central.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
