UC Libraries and Springer Sign Pilot Agreement for Open Access Journal Publishing

By Jacqueline Wilson, Senior Associate, Collections

CDL Collections and eScholarship in partnership with the UC Scholarly Communication Officers (SCOs) are piloting a ground-breaking open access publishing arrangement with Springer on behalf of UC faculty.  The two year experiment has already begun.  CDL sent out a press release about the pilot program on January 21, 2009.  The publicity was distributed to a variety of library information sources as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education and other standard UCOP media outlets.  Springer will also send the release to selected European contacts.  Information has been also posted on the CDL web site and on the Reshaping Scholarly Communication web site.

Laine Farley, CDL Executive Director, and Ivy Anderson, CDL Director, Collection Development and Management, have requested that the University Librarians communicate with appropriate faculty on their campuses to notify them of this pilot.  It will be important to the success of the pilot that as many UC faculty as possible know about this open access opportunity.  According to Springer, approximately 1,500 articles with at least one UC author are published annually in Springer journals. CDL will also be working with the SCOs on additional campus outreach as well as on an evaluation plan.

An article is eligible for Springer’s open access publishing option (called Springer Open Choice) if even one of the authors of an article is from UC. To invoke the Open Choice option, the corresponding or submitting author simply selects a UC campus affiliation from a drop-down box that appears on the acceptance screens that he or she completes once the article has been accepted for publication.  Therefore, the submitting author, if not from UC, must know about the program and indicate that one of their co-authors possesses a UC affiliation. This requires that the UC authors be familiar with the pilot and remember to inform their co-authors about the program.  A message on the acceptance screen will indicate that the Open Choice option is being made available to them at no charge through an arrangement with the University of California Libraries.

CDL will clarify some remaining issues about placing the final published Springer OA articles in the eScholarship Repository and we expect to begin this part of the pilot soon.

Please address questions to Jacqueline Wilson (jacqueline.wilson@ucop.edu), Senior Associate for Collections, California Digital Library.