Skip to content

Scholarly publishing

Scholarly publishing is a field undergoing rapid change, as many traditional publications migrate from print to electronic format. Historically, many publishers have required the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication, restricting the author’s right to use the work in future teaching and research.

However, it is possible for authors to transfer some rights to their publishers while holding on to the ability to use their own scholarly work for personal or instructional purposes.

Open access

One of the biggest transitions in scholarly publishing may be the acceptance of “open access” as a viable publishing model. Open access generally means that scholarly articles are made freely available on the web.

There are two primary models for delivering open access publications:

"Gold” open access model: Works are openly available on the publisher’s website. Open access journals and monographs may be supported through the payment of fees by authors upon submission or acceptance of their works, advertising, complementary products, endowments, or other ways.

"Green” open access model: Works are deposited (usually an earlier version than the final published version) into open access repositories, regardless of whether the work is open access on the publisher’s site.

As of October 23, 2015, all UC employees are covered by one of the UC open access policies, which reserve rights for UC faculty and employees to make their articles freely available to the public in an open access repository. They do this by automatically granting a non-exclusive copyright license to the University prior to any later agreements authors may make with publishers. UC retains those rights regardless of what rights authors may subsequently transfer to publishers. The OA policies don’t say where UC authors should publish or require them to pay open access fees to publishers in order to comply.

Read more about the UC Open Access Policies and Scholarly Communication at the UC Office of Scholarly Communication.