Three University of California campuses add their signature to OA2020’s Expression of Interest

The University of California, Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC San Francisco took a major step today towards the goal of making all scholarly journal literature freely available to the world by endorsing the international open access (OA) initiative, OA2020, led by Max Planck Digital Library.  The three UCs join the only other United States institution having signed on to OA2020’s Expression of Interest (EoI) to date, California State University, Northridge.

OA2020 is an international movement to convert the entire corpus of scholarly journal literature to open access by the year 2020. The OA2020 movement intends to accomplish this transition or “flipping” by encouraging institutions to convert resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds that support sustainable OA business models. It does not prescribe a particular model for the flipping, since that can vary by institution. Rather, OA2020 provides flexibility for institutions to define for themselves how to repurpose their journal subscription funds in support of OA publishing.

Faculty, administration, and library leaders from the three universities see enormous potential in the goals set out by the initiative to break down historic and financial barriers to journal access, and thereby serve society as centers of higher learning transmitting knowledge openly and freely. UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UCSF worked together to sign the OA2020 EoI before the Berlin 13 conference in Germany on March 21-22 this week. The campuses also put together the site OA2020.us to offer their perspectives about why they signed, and to provide resources for other institutions who want consider what OA2020 might mean for their institutions as well.

To read more, see UC Berkeley’s press release and UCSF’s press release. Have questions? Please contact us at the email address via the OA2020.us site.

Rachael Samberg |

Scholarly Communication Officer | The Library | University of California, Berkeley

Michael Wolfe |

Scholarly Communications Officer | UC Davis Library

Anneliese Taylor |

Assistant Director, Scholarly Communications & Collections | UCSF Library