University of California announces open access deal with SAGE Publishing

Sunlight spills onto the Campanile on the UC Berkeley campus.
The University of California has announced an open access deal with SAGE Publishing, among the leading publishers of UC research in the social sciences and humanities. (Photo by Keegan Houser/UC Berkeley)

Today, the University of California is announcing an open access deal with SAGE Publishing.

The agreement with SAGE, one of the leading publishers of UC research in the social sciences and humanities, lowers the barriers for UC researchers who want to make the fruits of their research freely available to everyone, everywhere.

Under the deal, the UC libraries will help relieve the financial burden on researchers publishing open access in a SAGE journal by contributing $1,000 toward every article processing charge, or APC. The UC libraries will cover the entire cost when the APC is less than $1,000 or when there’s not enough grant funding to cover the rest of the APC. UC authors will also get a discount on open access publishing in SAGE journals.

The agreement, effective from Jan. 1, 2022, to Dec. 31, 2024, covers an unlimited number of articles by authors — faculty, lecturers, staff, and students — at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Nearly all SAGE journals are included in the deal, save a few society journals.

The deal also provides reading access to the full portfolio of SAGE journals for faculty, lecturers, staff, students, and clinicians across the UC system.

“This agreement advances UC’s goal to accelerate the shift to a more open, fair, transparent, and sustainable scholarly communication system,” said Derjung Mimi Tarn, professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and chair of the UC Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. “This effort will advance the public mission of UC and its ongoing work to make the products of UC research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible.”

A global academic publisher, SAGE releases more than a thousand journal articles and 600 new books each year.

UC’s deal with SAGE is the latest in a string of open access agreements between the university system and a growing list of publishers, including, most recently, the American Chemical Society and Wiley.

Read answers to frequently asked questions about the deal on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication’s website.