As of March 2023, UC Berkeley has joined the UC system’s open access agreement with Wiley Publishing.

The partnership agreement is set to last from March 1, 2023 to Dec. 31, 2023. Its goal is to make it cheaper and simpler for all university authors to publish their research as “open access,” so that people around the globe can read it for free.

In the past, UC libraries paid for a reading subscription to Wiley’s journals. According to university librarian and chief digital scholarship officer Jeff MacKie-Mason, within the new agreement, the cost of the partnership will depend on the number of articles published by UC researchers, and the partnership will continue to cover unlimited access to all articles published by Wiley, including articles published by non-UC authors.

The new agreement that includes UC Berkeley is an expansion of the 2022 Wiley/UC agreement, which acted as a model for the current funding agreement. The 2022 pilot agreement encompassed five campuses: UC Irvine, UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz.

“Under that model, the UC libraries automatically cover the first $1,000 of an author’s article processing charge, or APC — also known as the open access fee. The UC libraries cover the entire fee for authors without the necessary funding,” MacKie-Mason said. “On the five campuses that initially piloted the shared funding model, the number of open access articles published in Wiley journals increased nearly threefold compared with previous years.”

The agreement encompasses not just researchers on campus, but also researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles and UC San Francisco, such that now all 10 university campuses are included.

All of the researchers at the aforementioned locations will be provided with more funding to support publishing open access as well. This will allow UC research to be available to more people globally.

“The scope of the deal is quite large. Ten percent of all UC research is published in Wiley journals. Extending the shared funding model to Berkeley, Davis, San Diego, UCLA, UCSF, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will quadruple the amount of UC research covered under the agreement,” MacKie-Mason said.

According to MacKie-Mason, making research accessible to the public will allow researchers from other universities to easily obtain and build upon the university’s discoveries. Open access allows the public to benefit from publicly funded discoveries of the university.

Beyond this agreement, the Berkeley library has also started discussion with the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium and Wiley on a publishing agreement starting in 2024.  This would cover open access throughout the state of California.