Why Open Access?

All material published or disseminated by eScholarship is available worldwide, free of cost, to researchers and the general public. The University of California provides this open access digital publishing service to its community through the eScholarship program as a means of increasing the reach and visibility of the scholarly work produced by UC-affiliated faculty, researchers, and graduate students.

Open access publishing is fully compatible with both peer review practices and copyright laws.

Citation Rates & Open Access

Studies show that open access digital publications are cited more often than print-based or restricted access (licensed) materials. Learn more about how open access affects citation rates at the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook or view a bibliography of studies on the effect of open access on citation rates at The Open Citation Project.

NIH Public Access Policy

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandates that any research funded by the agency be posted in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central open access digital archive within 12 months of publication in a subscription-only journal. Publishing your NIH-funded work in eScholarship alone will not fulfill this policy. However, the NIH explicitly allows authors to post their work in both PubMed Central and institutional repositories such as eScholarship. See additional information for UC authors regarding the NIH policy.

UC's Springer Pilot Program

In 2009, the University of California and Springer Science+Business Media established a groundbreaking pilot program intended to support open access publishing by UC-affiliated authors. Under the program, UC authors' work accepted in Springer journals between November 2008 and December 2010 will be published as Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access and automatic deposit in eScholarship.

For more information about the Springer Agreement, please see UC's Springer FAQ.

Questions? Contact us.