University of California strikes open access pact with PNAS

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the University of California system have agreed to begin a two-year trial of an open-access publishing pact that covers both author fees and subscription costs.

The agreement follows a similar arrangement reached last month with Jisc, the 156-university UK consortium.

The UC and Jisc experiences will be studied by PNAS, the official journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, to guide the development of PNAS’ future open-access policies, said its executive editor, Diane Sullenberger.

For the California system – which accounts for nearly 10 per cent of all US research output – PNAS becomes the latest in a series of partnerships aimed at ending the bottlenecks in scientific sharing created by the longstanding use of subscription models in academic publishing.

With other major partners that include Elsevier and the Public Library of Science, about a third of all UC-authored articles are now covered by open-access agreements, said one of the system’s lead negotiators, Jeffrey MacKie-Mason.

Under the agreement, UC expects to pay PNAS an annual publishing services fee of $55,000 (£40,000), covering an estimated 230 articles per year by California authors.

The arrangement gives all UC students and researchers access to all PNAS content, similar to the terms that PNAS negotiated with Jisc.

PNAS “will use data from these two pilots to evaluate the impact of such agreements and to inform future PNAS open-access policies”, Ms Sullenberger said.

PNAS said it also plans next month to begin accepting submissions for a new open-access journal, PNAS Nexus.

PNAS currently publishes more than 3,500 research papers annually, largely in the biological, physical and social sciences.

The California system reached a major breakthrough this past March by reaching the agreement with Elsevier after a two-year negotiating standoff. That agreement requires UC to pay author fees in cases where its researchers lack the necessary funds from their own grant awards.

UC’s agreements with PNAS and the others show “that there are multiple paths toward an open-access science environment”, said Keith Yamamoto, the vice-chancellor for science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com