Effective March 10, 2021, UC authors can make their research freely available for anyone to read through three new transformative open access publishing agreements with The Royal Society journals, Canadian Science Publishing (CSP), and The Company of Biologists (CoB).

These new, cost-neutral agreements will apply retrospectively to articles accepted after January 1, 2021 and will run through December 31, 2023. The contract with CSP is the first such agreement for a Canadian journal publisher.

The agreements achieve both of UC’s key goals for transformative open access journal agreements: controlling costs and providing for open access publishing in the full portfolio, including hybrid (subscription-based with open access options) and open access journals of The Royal Society, Canadian Science Publishing, and The Company of Biologists.

UC authors can now publish an unlimited number of research articles immediately open access. The CoB agreement covers all 10 UC campuses, while SCP and The Royal Society agreement are available to all campuses except UCSF. Under the agreement, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee, or article processing charge (APC), for all included UC authors who choose to publish in a contracted journal.

Authors are asked to pay the remainder if they have research funds available to do so.

Authors who do not have research funds available can request full funding of the APC from the libraries, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access in these journals.

By combining funding from the libraries with authors’ grant funds, the agreement provides a model for how research-intensive institutions can create a sustainable and inclusive path to full open access.

Publishers are exploring how to shift from subscription-based business models to models that make it easier and more affordable for researchers to publish their work open access.

The agreement also provides researchers on participating UC campuses with unlimited access to the full portfolio of Royal Society journals, Canadian Science Publishing journals, and The Company of Biologists’ journals and their archives.

For more detail about these agreements, please see:

• The Royal Society open access agreement
• The Company of Biologists open access agreement
• Canadian Science Publishing open access agreement

About UC’s Transformative Open Access Agreements:

Transformative open access agreements support UC’s mission as a public university and advance the global shift toward sustainable open access publishing by making more UC-authored research articles open to the world, while maintaining journal affordability. UC seeks to partner with publishers of all types, sizes and disciplines to jointly advance a worldwide transition to open access across the entire landscape of scholarly journal publishing. For more on these aims and principles, see UC’s Call to Action for Negotiating Journal Agreements at UC, the UC faculty Academic Senate’s Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication, and UC’s priorities for publisher negotiations.