Open Access

Open Access (OA) is an international movement to make peer-reviewed scholarly research quickly and freely available to the fullest community of users by removing barriers imposed by price, licensing, or copyright restrictions. In the US, federal and state funding agencies have adopted policies requiring that grant recipients provide public access to data and articles.

Understanding UC Open Access Policies

The Academic Senate of the University of California (UC) adopted an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge.

On October 23, 2015, a Presidential Open Access Policy expanded open access rights and responsibilities to all other authors who write scholarly articles while employed at UC, including non-senate researchers, lecturers, post-doctoral scholars, administrative staff, librarians, and graduate students. The primary platform in place to support these policies is eScholarship, UC’s open access repository.

Share your Publications on eScholarship

eScholarship is an open access repository that has supported the University of California academic community since 2002. UC researchers are able to share the full range of their scholarly output, from working papers and seminar series to previously published articles. Student work on eScholarship includes electronic theses and dissertations as well as undergraduate capstone projects.

RESEARCH SHARED ON ESCHOLARSHIP BENEFITS FROM:

• Broad digital dissemination for increased global visibility
• Full text indexing and search-engine optimization for enhanced discoverability
• Persistent access and preservation services

You can get started uploading your publications and other scholarly work by visiting UCR’s eScholarship webpage.

Apply a Creative Commons License to Your Work

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that offers a set of simple, easy-to-understand copyright licenses. These are legally enforceable copyright licenses that allow creators to license a work for reuse, with the aim of expanding the range of things available for others to share, quote, adapt, and build upon. The licenses can be applied to any work that is covered by copyright law including books, scholarly articles, movies, musical arrangements, and artwork.

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES DO TWO THINGS:

• They allow creators to share their work easily.
• They allow everyone to find work that is free to use without permission.

As long as you obey the terms of the license attached to the work, you can use Creative Commons licensed material without fear of accidentally infringing someone’s copyright. It is easy to find Creative Commons licensed material through search engines like Google's Advanced Image Search and Creative Commons' own search engine.

WHAT LICENSE OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE?

Creative Commons offers six licenses to choose from (viewable on the Creative Commons website). All of these licenses allow reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format. The different license options allow you to place additional restrictions on reuse. Note that Creative Commons licenses are not to be used with computer software or data (raw data cannot be copyrighted).

Sources:

• Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California
• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)