UC Santa Barbara Signs on to OA2020 Initiative

From UC Santa Barbara:

Affirming its belief that research generated at a public institution should indeed be available to the public at no cost — and its commitment to achieving that goal — UC Santa Barbara has now signed the OA2020 Expression of Interest. OA2020 is an international initiative that is exploring ways of advancing open access in partnership with scholars, libraries, publishers and funding agencies.

The move by the campus comes closely on the heels of the UC’s recent termination, systemwide, of its subscriptions with scientific publisher Elsevier, after protracted negotiations failed to net the university’s must-have result: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.

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We’ve been on this path a long time — UC is very committed to open access,” said UC Santa Barbara Librarian Kristin Antelman, who is closely involved in these tandem efforts to secure universal open access to university research. “It’s deeply embedded in our mission as a public institution, trying to enable the research to be available to other researchers around the world and applied to benefit society. It couldn’t be more core to our mission, and we’re at the point where the time for action has come, the time to speak with our dollars and our powerful faculty voices and the weight of the UC.”

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With its Expression of Interest, UC Santa Barbara is now a signatory to OA2020, which was born of an open access conference in Budapest in 2003. To date, 136 scholarly organizations worldwide, including multiple UC campuses, have signed on.

According to the OA2020 organization, based at the Max Planck Digital Library in Germany, “nearly 85% of the world’s scholarly outputs are still locked behind paywalls, inhibiting the full impact of research and putting enormous strain on institutional budgets.”

Read the Complete Announcement

See Also: Direct to OA2020 Website

• Complete List: Expression Of Interest in the Large-Scale Implementation Of Open Access to Scholarly Journals

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Collections, Elsevier, Funding, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing