UC to End Funding Support for Open Access Publishing with IEEE in 2024; Reading Access Will Continue
The University of California will end open access publishing support through its agreement with IEEE effective January 1, 2024. The UC libraries’ funding support for page charges will also end at that time. Reading access to IEEE publications will continue without interruption — essentially reverting to the type of agreement UC had with IEEE prior to the open access publishing pilot.
Since the pilot agreement began in July 2022, only 20 percent of UC authors publishing with IEEE have chosen to publish open access — far fewer than with UC’s other open access agreements — and of those who chose to publish open access, fewer contributed grant funds toward the open access fee than projected.
With the low number of UC authors choosing open access with IEEE, and the resulting financial costs under the structure of this particular pilot agreement, the data do not support its continuation. Cost containment has always been a top priority, and a metric against which all the University’s open access pilot agreements are evaluated. The decision to end funding support for publishing with IEEE was made by the UC Libraries in consultation with Faculty representatives from the Academic Senate, and supports that commitment to fiscal responsibility.
Even after UC’s funding support for publishing in IEEE journals ends, reading access to IEEE publications will continue.
UC authors who publish in IEEE journals will also still be able to make their articles open access, but starting January 1, 2024, authors will once again be responsible for covering the open access fee — as they were before the pilot agreement — since funding support will no longer be available through the UC libraries. As always, authors have the option to deposit their pre-publication, peer-reviewed author accepted manuscript in an open access repository like arXiv or UC’s eScholarship for free.
UC’s open access agreements with other publishers are also unaffected. While this specific approach, for these particular disciplines, did not work out as we hoped, author participation rates for UC’s other open access agreements are generally much stronger than they were with IEEE. Open access funding support remains available to UC-affiliated researchers who publish in journals covered under these other agreements, and authors are encouraged to take advantage of it.
UC researchers with questions about this change to the IEEE agreement should contact Jerrold Shiroma, jshiroma@ucmerced.edu.
