University of Southern California
AC-11: Open Access to Research

NIH Open Access Repository:
USC follows NIH requirements, which have established a Public Access Policy, which mandates that journal articles that arise from NIH funding must be submitted to PubMed central for open access. https://research.usc.edu/policies/sponsored-research/

USC's Digital Library:
USC also hosts a digital library which contains publications, unpublished research, and presentations by faculty of the University of Southern California
https://digitallibrary.usc.edu

Additional Open-Access Publishing Methods at USC:
The USC Libraries have signed transformative agreements with academic publishers that will broaden access to USC scholarship. Under the agreements, the publishers will make newly published articles by USC authors freely available (if the author chooses to publish as open access) to readers under an open access model.

Current Transformative Agreements (No-Cost to USC Authors to publish open-access)
American Chemical Society (ACS) - agreement through 2025 ***
Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) - agreement through 2023
Cambridge University Press - agreement through 2024 ***
The Institute of Physics (IOP) - NEW agreement through 2025 ***
Karger - agreement through 2024
PLOS (Public Library of Science) - NEW agreement through 2024
The Royal Society - NEW agreement for 2023
Springer - NEW agreement through 2024 ***
Wiley - agreement through 2023 ***

https://libguides.usc.edu/openaccess/transformative

Although USC does not currently have an open access policy, we do have an Open-Access Research Task Force which was formed on April 25th of 2022 around this initiative.

USC’s Open Access Task Force is exploring the adoption of an open access initiative centered around an open-access policy and a free open access repository where the public could access USC peer-reviewed published articles. An open access policy accompanying this repository would grant the university non-exclusive rights to scholarly work of university faculty and employees. This USC policy would include a waiver for any faculty that wish to opt out.

This open access initiative is modeled on examples across other universities such as all of the University of California campuses, Harvard University, Stanford, and University of Massachusetts Amherst.

USC Open Access Task Force Members:
Julie Hopper, PhD (Data Analyst, Office of Sustainability)

Silvia Da Costa, PhD (Director, Office of Research Initiatives & Facilities)

Alyssa G. Resnick, MLIS (Associate Dean, Technical Services & Collection Development, USC Libraries)

Melanee Vicedo, MLIS (Associate Dean, Teaching, Learning and User Engagement, USC Libraries)

Jennifer Dinalo, PhD (Clinical Information Services Librarian, USC Libraries)

External Consultant:
Dr. Peter Suber (Senior Adviser on Open Access, Director of Harvard Open Access Project)

Progress on Open-Access at USC:
The Task Force Presented to several Faculty Councils, the Academic Senate, and to the University Research Committee.

In addition, USC joined the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) in 2022. HELIOS emerged from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship and is a large, coordinated effort to align higher education practices with open scholarship values.
https://www.heliosopen.org/members

USC Libraries does not have a fund for this, but does have subscriptions with some vendors (transformative agreements), the cost of which covers article processing charges if scholars opt to publish in an open access mode.

Current Transformative Agreements (No-Cost to USC Authors to Publish Open-Access)
American Chemical Society (ACS) - agreement through 2025 ***
Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) - agreement through 2023
Cambridge University Press - agreement through 2024 ***
The Institute of Physics (IOP) - NEW agreement through 2025 ***
Karger - agreement through 2024
PLOS (Public Library of Science) - NEW agreement through 2024
The Royal Society - NEW agreement for 2023
Springer - NEW agreement through 2024 ***
Wiley - agreement through 2023 ***

https://libguides.usc.edu/openaccess/transformative

USC Libraries provides access (including indexing) to peer-reviewed open access journals through its catalog. The contents of these journals are hosted on the publisher’s servers and not hosted on local servers.

Most of the above data are based on current information as of September 2023.

~57.36% of all USC peer-reviewed scholarly works are open-access. This number is calculated based on 2022 publication data with USC affiliation pulled from the Scopus database
(https://www.scopus.com/search/form.uri?display=advanced).

These open-access publications are not in a USC-repository, but are available freely online to anyone, are are open-access based on the following: 1) Government-based sponsored repositories and open-access policies (such as NIH's PubMed), 2) USC's Transformative Agreements (read above for more detail), 3) USC Authors paid the journal to publish Open-Access through their grant funds, or their individual accounts, or 4) USC Authors published scholarly works with co-authors that had access to open-access funds, or are affiliated with an institution that implements an open-access policy and repository or has transformative agreements.