The University of California Libraries and Springer Science+Business Media (Springer) have concluded a ground-breaking experimental agreement to support open access publishing by UC authors. The arrangement is part of the journals license negotiated by the California Digital Library on behalf of the ten campuses of the University of California.
Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for
publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution,Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.
The University of California-Springer agreement is the first large-scale open access experiment of its type undertaken with a major commercial publisher in North America.