Today, University of California and academic publishing powerhouse Wiley are announcing a pilot deal that will make it more affordable for UC authors to publish their work open access — making it freely available to everyone — across Wiley’s journals.
Under the one-year pilot, authors at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who publish open access articles in Wiley journals in 2022 will get a 15 percent discount on the open access fee (also known as the article processing charge, or APC).
“This pilot agreement will make it more affordable for UC authors to publish open access with Wiley, a significant publisher for UC,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s university librarian and chief digital scholarship officer, and co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team. “We welcome the opportunity presented by this pilot to explore how UC and Wiley can work together to achieve UC’s aim of open access to its scholarship.”
The agreement covers articles published in all Wiley journals, including both hybrid (subscription-based) and fully open access journals. Authors who published an article earlier in 2022 will be contacted by Wiley and offered the opportunity to make their article open access at the discounted rate. If their article is already open access, they will receive a 15 percent refund from the publisher.
During 2022, authors at five UC campuses (Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz) can also pilot UC’s shared funding model for open access publishing, in which the UC libraries automatically cover the first $1,000 of the APC, and will pay the full APC for authors who do not have research funds available for this purpose. The pilot will provide an opportunity for Wiley to test the model, and to explore the possibility of expanding it to all UC campuses in the future.
In addition, the deal provides UC students, faculty, researchers, and health care professionals with unlimited reading access to all of Wiley’s journals.
Wiley’s portfolio spans over 8 million articles in 1,600 journals, with titles covering the life, health, and physical sciences; social science; and the humanities.
Learn more about the deal on UC’s Office of Scholarly Communication website.