University of California adopts OA policy

The University of California (UC)—the biggest public research university in the world, has decided to adopt a university wide open-access policy for research papers produced by its faculty. The move marks a major victory for open-access proponents and a blow to professional journals who publish research papers behind a pay wall.In its announcement, officials with UC indicated that the move to open-access was meant to send a message to the rest of the research community—that open-access to research material is vital to "the future of research." 【UC认同OA的概念】

Open access, as described by Creative Commons licensing agreements, essentially provide free access to anyone with an Internet connection. Going forward, all faculty at the university will be encouraged to post theirresearch papers to the university's eScholarship web site. Under the agreement, posters will have to grant the University a non-exclusive license to their papers (per Creative Commons guidelines) and promise that their papers have been peer reviewed. The change doesn't force faculty to post to the university site rather than submit their papers to professional publications such as Nature, orScience, instead it provides a platform for publishing to an open-access site should the authors wish to go that route.【在UC10校建立OA平台，自己的员工可以选择在此平台发布论文，前提是保证PeerReview过，同时给予该平台非专属授权。 员工可以自由选择在此平台或者其他商业学术期刊发表，非强制】

UC is not the first research organization to institute an open-access policy—various reports suggest that as many as 175 other universities have done so as well, perhaps most famously, MIT. The movement gained momentum after the White House issued a statement earlier this year announcing that all research papers that come about due to federal funds will be made available for free to the public within one year of being published in another journal.【现在有175家其他大学也有类似政策，包括MIT。白宫也表示联邦基金支持的研究论文发表1年内应免费开放给公众】

Critics argue that the move to open-access publishing isn't what it would appear at all. They suggest that researchers will still want to publish in well known journals—the wide readership and established reputations make them the gold standard—plus there is the issue of peer review. Professional journals spend a lot of money to ensure papers are thoroughly reviewed before they are published—money they recoup by restricting access to the paper to only those willing to pay for it. Papers that are published on open-access sites, on the other hand, may or may not be as thoroughly reviewed. 【批评认为研究人员可能仍然希望在知名期刊发布自己的论文，同时还有同行评议质量问题。专业期刊在同行评议方面非常出色，保证了论文质量。】