Editor’s note (Jan. 11, 2024): The University of California has extended its open access agreement with scholarly journal publisher Wiley for an additional three years. From Jan. 1, 2024, through Dec. 31, 2026, researchers and students at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will continue to be able to access subscription content and funding support for open access publication in Wiley’s expansive portfolio of journals.
Today, the University of California announced an expansion of the university’s open access agreement with Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers. Researchers at Berkeley — as well as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Davis, San Diego, UCLA, and UCSF — will now receive additional funding support to publish open access, making significantly more UC research freely available to people around the world.
What the agreement means for UC authors
Under the 2023 agreement, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee — also known as the article processing charge, or APC — for all UC faculty, students, and staff who publish in any of Wiley’s more than 1,600 journals. The libraries will pay the entire APC for authors who wish to make their work freely available but do not have the necessary research funds. UC authors will also continue to receive a 15 percent discount on the APC, which has been available since 2022.
Building on success
This shared funding model proved successful in the first year of the pilot between UC and Wiley. On the five campuses that participated in 2022 — Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz — the number of open access articles published in Wiley journals increased nearly threefold compared with previous years.
Bringing in Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Davis, San Diego, UCLA, and UCSF will quadruple the amount of UC research covered under the agreement, putting UC on track for an even greater number of open access articles in 2023. Ten percent of all UC research is published in Wiley journals.
The expanded systemwide pilot agreement covers an unlimited number of UC-authored articles published in Wiley journals in 2023.
More information
Learn more about the deal on UC’s Office of Scholarly Communication website, or contact the UC Berkeley Office of Scholarly Communication Services via email at schol-comm@berkeley.edu.