Open Access Overview

The University Library encourages publishing open access when it makes sense for authors. Open access means that the publication is freely and openly available online to read and share with attribution to the author(s).

As a UCSC author, you have options for publishing your articles openly, including ways to fund them, via:

• UC Open Access Policies:
  • Whether or not you publish open access directly with a publisher, you may make an early version of your article open access thanks to UC's Open Access Policies. Authors may upload their accepted manuscripts to eScholarship, which is UC’s institutional repository. This practice is also called self-archiving or green OA.
     
  • Alternatively, add your articles to a disciplinary repository that is open access (e.g., ArXiv, Humanities Commons, etc.).
     
• Publisher-specific support:
  • Use one of our open access publishing agreements between the UC Libraries and publishers to publish your article openly with a journal and receive support with the article processing charge (APC).
     
  • Apply a UC publishing discount for a percentage off of the open access fee or APC with the author responsible for the remainder with specific publishers. See more information about discounts for open access articles on the OA Funding page.
     
  • Publish through publishers with which the University Library has local agreements or discounts for articles.

Other outputs can be open access, too. See the webpages about open access books, open research data, and open educational resources (OER). Also, eScholarship supports uploading a variety of work and file types.