The University of California—an enormous institution that encompasses 10 campuses and over 8,000 faculty members—introduced an Open Access Policy late last week. This policy grants the UC a license to its faculty's work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper's publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship, its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge.

Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40,000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall. “It is much harder for individuals to negotiate these rights on an individual basis than to assert them collectively,” writes the UC. “By making a blanket policy, individual faculty benefit from membership in the policy-making group, without suffering negative consequences. Faculty retain both the individual right to determine the fate of their work, and the benefit of making a collective commitment to open access.”

Faculty members will be allowed to opt out of the scheme if necessary—if they have a prior contract with a journal, for example. Academic papers published in traditional journals before the enactment of this policy will not be made available on eScholarship at this time.

“As faculty members, we are asserting our control over the publication of scholarly research and recognize the responsibility for making that process sustainable and true to the intentions of scholars,” explained the UC on a FAQ page. “The faculty are also sending a strong collective message to publishers about the values and the system we would like in the future.”

The move comes at a time when the US federal government is heavily promoting open access. In February 2013, the White House announced that all science papers produced through federal funding would be made available to the public one year after their publication, and the Obama Administration is working to extend that policy to cover the information published by all federal agencies. Many other institutions have adopted open access policies, including 177 other universities and the World Bank.

As Chris Kelty, associate professor at the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, explained in a series of videos on the UC's eScholarship site: ”Everybody benefits from this really, the faculty benefit from this because their work's more widely available, it might come in for higher citations. The University benefits because the profile of the University is higher and it might send a message to Sacramento about our commitment to research. And the public benefits—whether you're a K-12 teacher, or someone in an emergency room looking for an article, or someone in business trying to get a patent, everyone in the public benefits from wider availability of our research.” In addition, Kelty explained, publishers “are quite reconciled to this” after seeing 177 other universities take a similar path.