Library News and Events

We will be launching a new homepage for the University Library website during the week of December 16, 2024. 

After conducting extensive user research, including interviews and web traffic analysis, and conducting usability studies of our prototypes, the UCSC Library will launch a new homepage to provide a more user-friendly experience for our students, faculty, and staff. 

You can see the new homepage on our testing site (must be on-campus or use campus VPN for access). 

Let us know what you think by using our website feedback form!

The Journal Open Access Look-up Tool (JOLT) launched this week. JOLT is a new resource for UCSC authors to easily determine if a journal qualifies for any funding support in one of UC’s open access publishing agreements.

UC’s open access agreements provide financial support to authors for the payment of open access fees. By reducing the amount authors must pay when they choose to publish open access, these agreements make it easier and more affordable for authors to share their scholarship freely and openly with the world. 

With JOLT, authors can search more than 10,000 journal titles to find out if a specific journal is covered by a UC agreement and the extent of available funding support. Additionally, JOLT search results provide links to an FAQ page that outlines the publisher agreement and its payment workflow details. 

As of November 2024, UC has signed open access publishing agreements with 17 publishers that cover up to the full amount of the open access fees. Nearly half of all UC-authored articles are eligible for open access under these agreements. The JOLT streamlines the navigation of these agreements for authors so that they can easily see their options for open access publishing. 

Reach out to the University Library with any questions about open access publishing via our email address, research@library.ucsc.edu, or by scheduling an Author Services one-on-one Zoom appointment.
 

If you access library resources using saved links or bookmarks with "oca.ucsc.edu" in the URL, please read on—this message is for you!

The Off-Campus Access Proxy Login service (OCA) will be discontinued on December 31, 2024. This service has been replaced by OpenAthens, a new authentication system that uses CruzID. Links in UC Library Search were updated last summer, so if you're accessing resources directly through UC Library Search, you're all set.

However, if you have any saved links or bookmarks that have "oca.ucsc.edu" in them, you will need to update these links to ensure continued access. You can easily do this using the Athenizer tool.

For more details, including instructions on how to update your links, visit our Online Access from Off-Campus page.

The Publishing Tips Series from the University Library starts Thursday, October 24. This series will cover answers to graduate students’ common questions about publishing, primarily on articles but also covering dissertations and books. The tips are asynchronous (read or listen!) and cross-disciplinary, and they specify when a practice applies to particular fields.

To participate in the Publishing Tips Series, use this sign-up form. The tips will arrive in your inbox on Thursday afternoons each week.

No time to read? Each installment will include an audio version to listen to it instead!

Here is the lineup:

  1. How long does it take to get published?
  2. How should I choose a journal for my article? Is this a good journal?
  3. How do I get support for the cost of open access publishing?
  4. What are the decision points during the publishing process?
  5. How do I respond to peer reviewers’ comments?
  6. Can I use this thing (e.g., photo, quote, data, figure, etc.) in my article without violating copyright? Also, how does it work to include an article in my dissertation?

One of these questions will be answered each week from October 24 - December 5 (except November 28).

This series is written by the Managing Editor of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication and Scholarly Communication Librarian at the UCSC University Library, Martha Stuit, who provides Author Services at the UCSC University Library. If you have any questions, please ask in the last question of the sign-up form or reach out to research@library.ucsc.edu
 

The University Library invites applications for participation in the pilot Open & Equitable Course Materials Community of Practice. The program application should take 5-10 minutes to complete.

If you struggle to get your students to complete course readings or find that you have to supplement your textbook a lot to make it work, this Community of Practice is for you! Receive $2,000 in funding, a project budget, and support from librarians and your peers to transition one of your modules or chapters to Open Educational Resources (OER). OER can be legally customized by instructors and this year-long program will focus on customizing materials within an equity lens. Some examples might include (but are not limited to):

  • Editing course materials to center underrepresented authors’ voices and perspectives
  • Adding new images, examples, names, and works cited to further representation and student belonging
  • Updating course materials to reflect gender inclusive language and pronouns
  • Removing harmful/ outdated language or frameworks (e.g. shifting to a substance use disorder framework instead of addiction)
  • Reorganizing course material content to be align with neurodivergent readers’ needs
  • Enhancing accessibility features, including alt text text, headings, and closed captioning to increase compatibility with screen readers

An information session will be held on November 4 from 1-2 PM on Zoom (register for the information session). Common questions are also addressed on our FAQ.

Still not sure if your project is in scope? Contact the OER Librarian to talk in more detail about your idea.
 

Are you a faculty member who wants to share your input on library services and collections? The University Library is holding focus groups for faculty on Tuesday October 15 from 9:30-10:30 AM and 2:30-3:30 PM on Zoom. The focus groups will inform the library's strategic planning process and ensure that faculty needs and perspectives are represented.

Please sign up for one of the focus groups. We will confirm your participation by emailing you with Zoom details.

Team members from DeEtta Jones & Associates (the consulting group the library is partnering with, see more information below) will facilitate the focus groups. No preparation is needed and all feedback will be anonymous. Please contact Librarian Sarah Hare (sehare@ucsc.edu) with any questions.


DeEtta Jones and Associates (DJA), is a Black and woman-owned consulting firm specializing in equity, diversity, and inclusion training and strategic planning. Established in 2005, they work with a myriad of industries to advise, educate, facilitate, and develop strategies for creating equitable organizations. They work directly with executives, industry and community leaders, and tens of thousands of people annually to broaden thinking, incorporate new practices, and commit to actionable strategies to fight systemic inequity. Their consulting team and faculty represent a variety of cultural and professional backgrounds and offer deep domestic and global experiences to clients.
 

Authors who elect to publish open access with Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open Select journals have their full publishing fees paid by the University Library. The news announcement covers more of the details. 

The Taylor & Francis FAQ answers common author questions.

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Taylor & Francis logo rectangle

The University Library is thrilled to introduce Annika Berry as the recipient of the 2024-2025 Fellowship in the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART).

Annika is a PhD student in the Creative/Critical Writing program of the Literature department. Originally from Portland, Oregon, they previously completed an MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UC Santa Cruz, and also hold a BFA in Film, Animation, and Video from the Rhode Island School of Design. Annika is both a visual artist and writer, having exhibited in galleries and museums nationwide. Her archival experience includes collecting oral histories for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and managing projects and exhibitions for artists in New Mexico and New York.

When she begins her fellowship in Fall 2024, Annika will be immersed in Special Collections & Archives for a full academic year, devoting 20 hours per week to archives and public projects in the library. Annika will process and make available the papers of Donna Haraway, UCSC Distinguished Professor Emerita in History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies. Annika will then curate a public exhibition showcasing archival collections, opening in Spring 2025.

Stay tuned for more information on Annika’s work throughout the year!

 

Meet Annika Berry

Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you decide to come to UCSC for your graduate studies?

I arrived as part of the first cohort of the Environmental Art & Social Practice MFA program. I was drawn by so many things… the legacy of social and environmental justice and activism on campus, the interdisciplinary scholarship that emerges here, the location, the ocean. Less than a year in, I had the opportunity to take courses with faculty in the creative writing program and fell in love with working at that intersection between writing and visual art. And also (I was living across the country at the time in the midst of deep pandemic) I Googled the campus, audibly swooned, etc.


You’ve been working on an archival project for a while on the author S. Paige Baty. What are some of the most interesting aspects you’ve found so far in this work?

About six months after moving here, I stumbled across one of Baty’s books at Bad Animal (that used bookstore in town) and was intrigued by her written voice. I wanted to learn more about her, but could hardly find any information online. I ended up learning that Baty had been a student in the History of Consciousness program in the 1980s, so I began curiously reaching out to people who I thought might have known her. That search began to reveal a vast and complicated archive. One of the most interesting aspects of the work has been the problem of how to make legible the things that are so often absent from institutional archives: ephemeral elements like emotions, feelings, half-forgotten memories, lost and missing texts… I suppose I’m obsessed with how to make space in an archive for everything it “can’t” contain.


How did you hear about CART, and what attracted you to the fellowship?

I first heard about CART a year or so ago and recognized it as a really unique opportunity to deep-dive into archival theory and practice. When the call emerged for someone to work on the Haraway papers, I was so excited. Overall, I really value CART’s commitment to accessibility, and seeking out new ways to invite broad community and student engagement with archives in general. These collections can feel intimidating to approach, but I really believe there’s so much creative work waiting to happen in and around these sites.


What are some of your favorite things to do outside of your studies and work?

Santa Cruz has taught me how to slow down! But admittedly, the things I love doing here are probably familiar: swimming in the ocean, walking around the arboretum, cooking with insane year-round produce. Over the past year, I’ve been exploring the UC Natural Reserve System, getting away for little weekend writing retreats with friends and seeing more of the Central Coast. It sounds silly but I also love e-mail — not for school or work, but as a correspondence platform. I really love to write and receive letters.

 

The Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART), established in 2014 at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, has trained dozens of graduate students in archives and exhibition work since its inception. In cultivating impactful learning experiences, CART develops students' archival research skills to support their career success, and increases access to unique Library resources for all.

Learn more about CART on our website.
 

The library is implementing a new seamless and secure login experience. As a result, the contents you’ve saved to your ProQuest Ebook Central bookshelves will disappear.
 
You can back up any bookshelf contents you want to keep by exporting them following these instructions. After June 23, 2024 you will no longer be able to access your current ProQuest Ebook Central bookshelf and you will have a new bookshelf.
 
After June 23, 2024, you can again add items to your ProQuest Ebook Central bookshelf and create new folders. 
 
If you have any issues exporting your bookshelf items or accessing your ProQuest Ebook Central account, please contact the Library for assistance

Come visit two new exhibits in Special Collections & Archives curated by student workers: Power Through Organization, and Celebration and Self-Representation: Asian American and Pacific Islander Student Life at UC Santa Cruz

Celebration and Self-Representation is located in the McHenry Third Floor hallway outside of the Special Collections & Archives reading room and is viewable during all library open hours. 

Power Through Organization is viewable in Special Collections & Archives during reading room open hours
 

Power Through Organization: A Student-Curated Exhibition in Special Collections & Archives

Student organizing is a part of the fabric of college campuses, and through awareness campaigns, protests, and embodying shared ideals, these movements resonate with profound solidarity for strongly held beliefs and local and global issues. This exhibit–conceived and organized by current UCSC students–highlights campus organizing efforts in order to preserve and promote the voices of student activists. In order of display, the exhibit focuses on student response to the Persian Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian campaign, apartheid in South Africa, the Delano grape strike, women’s rights, the naming of College 7, and affirmative action.

This exhibit also serves as a tribute to student voices that refuse to be silenced by the passage of time. It's a reminder of the power of collective action and the impact it has in shaping our society.

Join us as we honor the legacies of those who dared to challenge the status quo, and whose voices echo through our campus and beyond. This is not just a collection of events; it's a celebration of the resilience and resolve of student activism.
 

Celebration and Self-Representation: Asian American and Pacific Islander Student Life at UC Santa Cruz

At UC Santa Cruz, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students have united to assert their presence and foster a sense of community. Acknowledging that the university and city have not always recognized and welcomed Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, students engage in tactics of self-representation and proudly celebrate their diverse identities.

Through cultural celebrations, collective action, and educational resources, AAPI students actively shape their experiences on campus. This exhibit showcases their efforts through a collection of historical materials, including records from the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, the UCSC Poster Collection, and various student publications.

Celebration and Self-Representation was curated by student workers in Special Collections and Archives. Our goal is to start conversations about records created by Asian American and Pacific Islander students. We hope that visitors will feel welcome to visit Special Collections, inspired to create their own archives documenting their experiences at UCSC, and make connections between past and present student life.

This exhibition is co-curated by Benyamin Alfaro, Alana Corona, Samantha Elfiqhi, Sophia Gallaga-Rabinowitz, and Prema Reyes with assistance from Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Alix Norton, and Sam Regal. We received feedback from our student advisor, Madeline Bautista Mauer, PASIFIKA programs and outreach intern.

 

Open access publishing support will continue for articles in Wiley journals for three more years. UC’s agreement with Wiley to provide funding for open access publication is renewed with the same terms through December 31, 2026.

What’s new is that 48 California libraries, in addition to the University of California system, are part of this agreement, so we are expanding OA opportunities for authors across the state.

Please see the Office of Scholarly Communication blog post for more information. For all of our publishing agreements and discounts, the terms vary, and it is key for authors to understand the details early in the publishing process – please also see UC’s Wiley FAQ.   
 


Journal images courtesy of Wiley

 

Open access publishing support for 20 humanities, social science, and sustainability Frontiers journal titles is now available for UCSC authors. The agreement is a pilot that began on August 1, 2023 and goes through July 31, 2024.

The way this open access publishing agreement works is that the full cost of the article processing charge (APC) (i.e., open access fee) is covered by the UC Libraries for the following 20 journals:

  • In humanities and social sciences:
    • Frontiers in Behavioral Economics
    • Frontiers in Communication
    • Frontiers in Digital Humanities
    • Frontiers in Education
    • Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology
    • Frontiers in Environmental Economics
    • European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy
    • Frontiers in Human Dynamics
    • Frontiers in Political Science
    • Frontiers in Sociology

 

  • In sustainability:
    • Frontiers in Climate
    • Frontiers in Forests and Global Change
    • Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability
    • Frontiers in Sustainability
    • Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
    • Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy
    • Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
    • Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management
    • Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism
    • Frontiers in Water

To ensure the APC fee is covered, authors need to select UCSC as the payer when they submit their manuscript. As with all of the other UC open access publishing agreements, the corresponding author must have been currently affiliated with UCSC at the time of acceptance for the article (for Frontiers, those dates are between August 1, 2023, and July 31, 2024). More details are available in our Frontiers FAQ.

Frontiers is just one of many publishers with which the UC Libraries have an open access publishing agreement or discount. The full list of agreements that UC has signed outlines the unique payment support terms for each publisher. Note that the terms can vary significantly by publisher, and please do not hesitate to reach out to the University Library (research@library.ucsc.edu) if you have questions or want to make sure you are clear about any of the publisher agreements before you submit. 

Starting September 14, 2023, email notifications from the UC Publication Management System are going out to authors who are covered by the UC Presidential Open Access Policy. This is the same system that Senate Faculty have been using since the implementation of the UC Open Access Policies.

In addition to faculty, the UC Publication Management System will now also notify UCSC authors in the following categories: 

  • non-senate researchers, 
  • lecturers, 
  • post-doctoral scholars, 
  • administrative staff, 
  • librarians, and 
  • graduate students.

if they have articles to verify and either upload or share the open access link. 

This system supports authors’ participation in UC Presidential Open Access Policy by making it easier for them to share their scholarly articles open access in eScholarship

When authors get a welcome message from the system, they may go ahead and manage their publications. Following the welcome message, authors will only receive notifications when there is a new publication to manage. 

If you have questions about the UC Publication Management System, UC Open Access Policies, or open access publishing at UCSC, please reach out to the University Library at research@library.ucsc.edu

Other relevant resources include: 

The University Library is thrilled to introduce Meleia Simon-Reynolds as the recipient of the 2023-2024 Fellowship in the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART).

Meleia is a PhD candidate in the History department, the Co-Director of the Watsonville is in the Heart Digital Archive, and the Okinawa Memories Initiative Exhibits Team Lead and Curriculum Development Co-Lead. Meleia and her team in the Watsonville is in the Heart Oral History project have been partnering with the University Library since 2021 to document and preserve the stories of Filipino American families in the Pajaro Valley area. The project is ongoing, with more oral histories to be added in the future. Audio recordings of the interviews can be accessed via Soundcloud, and the collection guide with descriptions of interviews and family biographies can be accessed on the Online Archive of California.

When she begins her fellowship in Fall 2023, Meleia will be the first CART fellow to be immersed in Special Collections & Archives for a full academic year, devoting 20 hours per week to archives and public exhibition projects in the library. During the year, Meleia will process and make available the papers of local artist and philosopher Nina Graboi, as well as the records of the Watsonville-Santa Cruz chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). She will then curate a public exhibition using archival collections which will open in Spring 2024.

Stay tuned for more information on Meleia’s work throughout the year, and about the 10th anniversary of the Center for Archival Research and Training coming up in 2024!

 

Meet Meleia Simon-Reynolds

Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you decide to come to UCSC for your graduate studies?

I initially decided to attend UCSC’s History doctoral program in order to study with my advisor, Dr. Alice Yang. Her expertise in Asian American studies and oral history aligned with my desire to pursue research topics in Filipino American history and investigate personal and collective memories of migration to the United States. I was also excited by the opportunity to receive training and a designated emphasis in Visual Studies through the History of Art and Visual Culture department. This training has shaped my dissertation research on Filipino American migrant photography. 

Another reason I decided to come to UCSC was because I was born in Santa Cruz. Although my family no longer lives in the area, I felt comfortable here. Through my community-engaged work with the Watsonville is in the Heart research initiative, I have been able to learn many things I never knew about Santa Cruz County’s diverse history and form relationships with community members. This experience has made UCSC and the Santa Cruz community feel even more like home. 

 

How did you hear about CART, and what attracted you to the program?

I initially heard about the CART program during my orientation. Over my first few years of graduate school, I was able to attend workshops about conducting archival research that were immensely helpful to me. I applied for the CART fellowship because through my experience with the Watsonville is in the Heart initiative I developed a passion for archival work. I was also able to work with Special Collections staff like Alix, Teresa, and Rebecca. I am excited for the opportunity to learn so much more about archival theory and practice through the CART program and hopefully prepare to apply for jobs in archiving after I graduate. 

 

What is the most important thing you’ve learned while working with Watsonville is in the Heart and the Okinawa Memories Initiative?

I have learned so much through my work with the Watsonville is in the Heart and Okinawa Memories Initiative. Through these projects I was introduced to public humanities and community-engaged research.  I find this type of work incredibly meaningful because I am able to create strong relationships with community members and organizations. The most important lessons I have learned are the importance of building trust and allowing communities to lead the way when preserving and researching their histories. These have been my guiding principles as I engage with communities who have been historically marginalized in institutional archives and often exploited by university researchers. 

 

What are some of your favorite things to do outside of your studies and work?

Outside of school and work my favorite thing to do is cook for my friends and family. For me, cooking is meditative and the best way to relax after a long day. Recently, I have also found a lot of joy in attending adult ballet classes at Motion Pacific Dance. It has been really exciting to get back into a hobby I did so often growing up. 

 

The Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART), established in 2014 at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, has trained dozens of graduate students in archives and exhibition work since its inception. In cultivating impactful learning experiences, CART develops students' archival research skills to support their career success, and increases access to unique Library resources for all.

Learn more about CART on our website.

The Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) is pleased to announce the opening of this year’s exhibitions curated by the 2022-2023 graduate fellows. These two exhibitions feature the Ingeborg Gerdes Photographs and Papers, as well as the Florence Wyckoff Papers, the William H. Friedland Papers, the William MacKenzie Papers, and the California Farm Research and Legislative Committee Records.

 

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Gerdes Friedland black and white photograph of two women leaving

Ingeborg Gerdes in Process: The Making of an Artist, curated by Yulia Gilich, features materials from the newly acquired collection of Ingeborg Gerdes Photographs and Papers. The vast collection reflects the legacy of artist Ingeborg Gerdes, including her meticulous craftsmanship and prolific photographic career, momentous personal life, and commitment to teaching. Born in Germany in 1938, Gerdes was known for photographing her travels through the American West among other locales, and taught at UC Santa Cruz for over two decades. The collection also offers a glimpse of the history of photography as a medium, which dramatically changed over the course of Gerdes’ life and career. Containing exhibition prints, film negatives, work prints, contact sheets, and slides, the exhibit traces Gerdes’ photographic trajectory from black and white film to color and, later, to digital photography.

 

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Front page of the California Farm Reporter. Headline reads "Homemakers Organize!"

Beyond the Ivory Tower: Community engagement, education, and organizing in California’s Central Coast, curated by Riley Collins, Carrie Hamilton, Brittney Jimenez, and Summer Sullivan, tells a story about different approaches for eliciting social change in California’s Central Coast and beyond. While the large-scale, vegetable-dominant agriculture of the region has led to prosperity for some, it has resulted in unjust conditions for others. The area’s farm workers, in particular, have for decades faced numerous challenges related to immigration, labor, race and ethnicity, and education. The collections featured in this exhibition demonstrate that there are many avenues for activism both in and outside of academia, and are united around a goal of community-oriented social change for underrepresented groups, particularly the working class and immigrants. Central to the theories of change presented in each collection is the power of education as a public and social good.

Both exhibits are on view from June 15th to December 8th, 2023, in the Third Floor Gallery of McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz.

For more information on these exhibitions and collections, visit the Special Collections & Archives website or contact Special Collections & Archives at speccoll@library.ucsc.edu.

The University of California announced today an expansion of the university’s open access agreement with Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers. Building on the success of a 2022 pilot agreement at five UC campuses, including Santa Cruz, researchers at all 10 UC campuses will now receive funding support to publish open access, making significantly more UC research freely available to people around the world.

 



What the agreement means for UC authors



Under the 2023 agreement, the UC libraries will continue to pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee, or article processing charge (APC), for faculty, students, and staff at UCSC who publish in any of Wiley’s more than 1,600 journals. The libraries will pay the entire APC for authors who wish to make their work freely available but do not have research funds available. UC authors also receive a 15 percent discount on the APC.

 



Building on success



This shared funding model proved successful in the first year of the pilot between UC and Wiley. On the five campuses that participated in 2022 — Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz — the number of open access articles published in Wiley journals increased nearly three-fold compared with previous years.



Bringing in Berkeley (including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Davis, San Diego, UCLA and UCSF will quadruple the amount of UC research covered under the agreement — putting UC on track for an even greater number of open access articles in 2023. Ten percent of all UC research is published in Wiley journals.



The expanded systemwide pilot agreement covers an unlimited number of UC-authored articles published in Wiley journals in 2023.

 



More information



For more details about the agreement, please visit the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website or contact the University Library at research@library.ucsc.edu.

 

The University Library is pleased to announce the awardee of the Visualizing Abolition Artist in the Archive Residency for the 2022-2023 academic year: Ontario Alexander.

Ontario Alexander (he/him) is a Cross-Cultural Musicology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His area of study includes historical musicology in the French Baroque period and the roles of colonial history and theory in music. Other areas of interest include African American Black music history and social theory of music concerning the developments of gospel, blues, and jazz music as acts of political resistance, struggles for freedom, and cultural affirmation. Alexander holds an M.A. in Vocal Performance and an M.B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and a B.A. in Theater from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. As a multidisciplinary artist, he integrates his art practice into his research.

The Visualizing Abolition Artist in the Archive Residency fosters creative research and experiential learning about prisons, policing, and the movement for abolition through archival engagements with UC Santa Cruz University Library Special Collections & Archives. Created in partnership with the Mellon Foundation funded Visualizing Abolition public scholarship initiative, the Archive Residency Program offers a one-year stipend and research support for a graduate student artist to engage with unique primary materials in Special Collections & Archives and examine the University’s role in police and prison abolition, critique dominant historical narratives and archival silences, and/or explore connections between art, history, and social justice.

This program supports the goal of the Visualizing Abolition initiative: to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education. Additionally, it is in alignment with the University Library goal of student success by providing an opportunity for experiential learning, and to present research and works-in-progress associated with the Library. This is the first year of this residency program, and is therefore being approached as a pilot project intended to explore the possibilities of collaborative programming in this area.

Registration for this event is now closed. 

Thank you for your interest! We hope you will join us for similar events in the future.

The federal government is making significant moves to encourage open access to research. This summer, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) made national headlines with its new guidance that, by 2026, research funded by all federal agencies should be made freely and immediately available to the public, with no embargo.

“Right now, you work for years to come up with a significant breakthrough, and if you do, you get to publish a paper in one of the top journals,” the White House announcement quoted then-Vice President Biden as saying in remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research in 2016. “And here’s the kicker — the journal owns the data for a year.”

The new guidance will bring about three significant changes to the status quo:

  • Removing the 12-month delay before research publications funded by the largest federal agencies become publicly available;
  • Directing that both federally-funded research publications and their supporting data should be made publicly accessible at the time of publication; and
  • Bringing all federal agencies into alignment with this open access publishing policy.

While the agencies are being given time to determine how they will operationalize the new guidance, the principles at its heart are in sync with the University of California’s long-standing commitment to make our research freely available to the scientific community and the public.

Here is what UC researchers should know now about what to expect:

 

When will these changes go into effect?

The OSTP guidance recommends that all federal grantmaking agencies implement the recommended changes no later than Dec. 31, 2025. Some agencies may update their grant requirements sooner.

 

What will I need to do with my research articles once this policy takes effect?

While many of the details are yet to come as each federal agency determines how they will implement the OSTP guidance, what we can infer now is that:

  • We expect the agencies that already have policies regarding public access to the research they fund will continue to use their existing processes to the extent possible, updating them as needed to align with the new guidance. We will know more about those changes once the agencies release their updated public access plans.

     
  • If you obtain future research funding from a smaller agency that does not yet require deposit in an open access repository, the agency will develop a policy requiring you to make your funded articles open access in some form. (The details may vary by agency.)

 

How does this federal guidance interact with UC’s open access publishing options?

As a UC researcher, you do not have to wait for this government policy to be implemented to make your research open access. In fact, the University of California has had an Open Access Policy in place for many years that enables UC authors to make their research publicly available immediately. To do so, you have several options:

  • If you choose to publish in a journal that is part of one of UC’s open access publishing agreements, the UC libraries will pay part or all of the open access publishing fee on your behalf depending on the terms of the agreement, using library funds that were previously allocated to pay solely for journal subscriptions.

     
  • If UC does not have an open access agreement with the publisher of the journal that has accepted your article, you can typically choose to pay an open access publishing fee to publish your article open access. Under the OSTP guidance, all federal agencies should allow researchers to include publication and data-sharing costs in their research budgets.

     
  • Another cost-free option is to upload your final accepted manuscript (i.e., prior to typesetting by the publisher) into UC’s institutional repository eScholarship. UC’s Open Access Policies allow you to make your final accepted manuscript immediately available unless the journal’s publisher requests an embargo period or a waiver of the UC policy (learn more about open access or contact us at research@library.ucsc.edu).



 

Will the new federal guidance make it easier to get funding to cover the cost of open access publishing?

While we do not yet know the details of how each agency will implement the OSTP guidance, based on the current approach of the large federal agencies, there will be a no-cost option available — such as an approved government repository — where you (or the publisher) can deposit your manuscript and meet the open access requirement at no cost.

If you wish to make the final version of your article on the journal’s website open access, the UC libraries will pay some or all of the cost for you if UC has an open access publishing agreement with the publisher. Under most of these agreements, if you do not have research funds available to pay for open access publishing, the UC libraries will pay the full amount and there will be no cost to you. Each agreement is different, so it is important to look at the terms and talk to the library when using an open access publishing agreement.

Importantly, the financial models of these agreements work when enough authors who do have research funds available for open access publishing pay their share. Most funding agencies already allow funds to be used for open access publishing fees, including flexible money that may not have been allocated explicitly for this purpose in the grant budget at the outset. The OSTP guidance, which specifies that “federal agencies should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs,” reinforces this position for all federal agencies.  



 

Where and how do I share my data?

As agencies implement the OSTP guidance on data sharing, they may recommend or require specific repositories. Until those details are known, a subject-specific repository is usually the best place to share your data since it will be an intuitive location for other scientists to look for datasets in a particular field. There are also general repositories that take in a variety of subjects and interdisciplinary datasets. UC has partnered with the Dryad repository, and UC affiliates can deposit data there for free (as long as it is open and unrestricted, and contains no personally identifiable human subject information; see the Dryad FAQ for details).

Tip: When submitting data to a general repository, include data collection protocols, instruments, and other relevant documentation to ensure ease of data reuse. This will significantly enhance how FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) the data are.



 

Who can I contact if I have more questions?

If you have questions that were not answered above, please contact the Library at research@library.ucsc.edu.

 

A partnership between the University Library and the Visualizing Abolition initiative, this program provides space, support, and resources for a graduate student project that creatively engages the Library's special collections.

The residency lasts from fall 2022 to spring 2023, and is open to all enrolled graduate students in the Arts Division. For more details (including instructions on how to apply), see the Institute for Arts and Sciences website.

Applications are due October 3.