The USC Libraries have signed transformative agreements with two academic publishers that will broaden access to USC scholarship. Under the agreements, Cambridge University Press and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) will make newly published articles by USC authors in more than 7,600 journals and other titles freely available to readers under an open access model.
The agreements will also realize significant cost savings for USC researchers. Academic publishers typically charge processing fees when authors publish open access articles in what are known as hybrid (a mix of paywalled and open access content) or gold (fully open access) journals. In 2019 alone, USC authors paid $177,000 in fees to the two publishers—costs that were borne by schools and academic departments, funding agencies, and even by individual authors themselves. Under the agreements, those fees will now be waived.
Two new articles, one from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and another from the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, have already been accepted under the new agreements.
The two deals were negotiated by consortia of which the USC Libraries are members—the Cambridge University Press agreement by the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), and the ACM agreement by the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA). Alyssa G. Resnick, co-associate dean of collections for the USC Libraries, is responsible for implementing them and plans to negotiate similar deals with other publishers in the future.
For more information, USC researchers should contact their respective subject librarians.