UC Irvine first campus to launch Presidential OA Policy

This week, UC Irvine became the first UC campus to launch the UC Presidential Open Access Policy implementation, enabling UC Irvine Health Science Clinical Professors and Librarians to join their Academic Senate colleagues in using the UC Publication Management System to make their scholarly articles freely available in eScholarship, UC’s open access repository and publishing platform. 

Thanks to increasingly enthusiastic participation in the Academic Senate OA Policy, the global community, both academic and public, now have access to nearly 46,000 articles that would otherwise be locked behind publisher paywalls. Participation in the Presidential OA Policy builds on this momentum by extending UC’s OA policy participation to an additional 210,000 employees, substantially broadening the reach of UC research and scholarship, and granting UC the distinction of having the most extensive institutional OA policy in the country. UC’s OA policies collectively empower all UC employees to make their publications available to the public for free in eScholarship, regardless of where those articles are originally published or how restrictive the publishers’ default use policies might be. 

We spoke with Mitchell Brown (UC Irvine Libraries Scholarly Communications Coordinator and Research Librarian for Chemistry, Earth System Science and Russian Studies) about UC Irvine’s roll-out and their success building interest in open access policy participation. Read more at the Office of Scholarly Communication blog.