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Update as of October 4, 2023
UC will end the open access publishing portion of its agreement with IEEE effective January 1, 2024, due to low author participation. Funding for page charges will also end at that time. Reading access to IEEE publications will continue without interruption; only UC’s funding support for publishing with IEEE is ending.
The University of California announced two new open access publishing agreements on July 27. The first supports open access publishing with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as IEEE, a technical professional organization which is among the largest publishers of UC research. The other is an extension of UC’s 2020 agreement with Springer Nature that adds funding support for open access publishing in the prestigious Nature journals; previously only titles in the Springer portfolio were eligible.
UC has now secured more than a dozen open access agreements with various publishers, a notable milestone in the University’s effort to make it easier and more affordable for its authors to publish open access. Open access publishing, which makes UCLA research freely available to the public, is central to UCLA’s mission as a public university.
About the agreement with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The four-year agreement with IEEE, now in effect, enables UCLA and UC-affiliated corresponding authors to publish open access in all IEEE journals, regardless of whether they have research funds available to pay for open access publishing or not.
UCLA authors who have research funds available for open access publishing will pay their own open access fee (known as an article processing charge, or APC). For authors who do not have sufficient funds available to pay the APC, the UCLA Library will cover the full cost on their behalf, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UCLA authors who wish to publish open access in IEEE journals. The agreement also covers overlength page charges for all UCLA authors regardless of how they choose to publish with IEEE.
The IEEE open access publishing agreement applies to articles accepted for publication from July 15, 2022 through December 31, 2025.
The deal also provides UCLA scholars with reading access to over five million documents from the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, including scientific journals, proceedings, and standards.
For details, see the IEEE agreement FAQ(opens in a new tab) on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website.
About the agreement with Nature
Beginning August 1, 2022, UCLA Library will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the article processing charge (APC) for UCLA corresponding authors who choose to publish open access in the Nature portfolio of journals, including Nature, the Nature research journals, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.
The remainder due on each APC for publishing in these journals must be covered by the authors themselves, utilizing research funds available to them. Authors without research funds to pay the remainder of the APC may publish their articles on a subscription basis.
While the Nature journals are not eligible for full coverage of the APC, UCLA authors publishing open access in Springer Nature’s other journals (including Adis, Biomed Central, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, Springer Open, and hybrid Academic journals on Nature.com) will continue to receive the UCLA Library automatic $1,000 contribution, as well as the option for full coverage of the APC if they lack research funds for publication. Contact us if you have questions about a specific journal that has accepted your article for publication.
Springer Nature: Building on success
The addition of the Nature titles fulfills a commitment from both UC and Springer Nature to work towards a comprehensive open access publishing agreement that includes Nature, and builds on the success of the first two years of the agreement for the Springer journals.
Since it began in summer 2020, the agreement has resulted in a three-fold increase in UC open access articles published in Springer Nature journals. UC researchers published over 1,300 open access articles in Springer Nature journals in 2021, up from 400 in 2020. UC is now on track for an even greater number of open access articles to be published in 2022 and beyond.
All aspects of the Springer Nature agreement, including UCLA’s reading access to all currently licensed Springer Nature journals, will continue through December 31, 2024.
More information
For details, see the IEEE agreement FAQ(opens in a new tab) and Springer Nature agreement FAQ(opens in a new tab) on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website.
For any further questions, contact Alison Scott, associate university librarian for collections and scholarly communication, at alisonms@library.ucla.edu(opens in a new tab).