OA Publishing @ SJSU (ScholarWorks)

The Open Access Movement is a worldwide effort to provide users with free online access to and use of scholarly and scientific research.

Open access is considered a property of individual works but is used to identify the journals, archives, and repositories that make content freely available. Conventional refereed journals and other peer-reviewed sources have been the means for disseminating scholarship and the basis of tenure and promotion decisions for decades.

The interest in open access was partially triggered by the increasing financial burden for libraries of maintaining scholarly journal subscriptions. Currently, libraries can only provide access to a representative sample of journals across the disciplines.

Scholarly open access literature is not free to produce or publish but is free of charge to users. Open access is compatible with peer review, copyright, and the tenure and promotion process.

Funder Mandates

More and more governmental and nongovernmental funders are requiring articles reporting on research they support to be made freely available to the public.

Examples:

• U.S. Federal Agencies and Departments - In 2022 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued guidance to all federal departments and agencies that research and publications funded by taxpayers must be made available immediately without an embargo or cost. These new policies must be in place by the end of 2025.
• California Department of Public Health - Governor Jerry Brown signed AB-609, The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act into law on September 29, 2014. The new law requires that articles reporting on research funded by the California Department of Public Health be made openly available to the public through online repositories no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - Starting in 2025, the Gates Foundation will require awardees to upload their manuscripts into a preprint server and will no longer pay APCs for making articles open access.

In 2008, the Academic Senate created a task force to investigate Open Access at SJSU. This resulted in a report of recommendations to the senate published on March 8, 2010.  The following month, the senate voted to approve a resolution to support open access.