The University of California Press has just announced a pair of initiatives that mark its major institutional push into scholarly open access, “Collabra and Luminos, two new open access programs for journal and monograph publishing.” UC Press, which provides the academic publishing infrastructure for the University of California university system, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, and which claims to be “the world’s greatest public research university,” declares that: “Collabra and Luminos launch with a distinguished group of advisory board members, editors, authors, and reviewers from universities and associations around the globe.”

The announcement continues:

The mega journal Collabra is based on an innovative model designed to share value generated from publishing an article among editors and reviewers who contribute to its success. Instead of retaining all funds generated from author article processing charges (APCs), UC Press directly compensates reviewers and editors for their work on the journal; reviewers and editors can then opt to pass these earnings on to an APC waiver fund that benefits other authors or to their institution’s open access fund.

Collabra at launch will focus “on three broad areas”: life and biomedical sciences, ecology and environmental science, and social and behavioral sciences. Luminos, meanwhile, will proceed on an open access model for monographs:

Luminos shares the cost burden of publishing in manageable amounts across the academic community. For each title, UC Press makes a significant contribution, augmented by membership funds from supporting libraries. Authors will then be asked to secure a title publication fee to cover the remaining costs. Additional revenue from supporting libraries and print sales will help to support an author waiver fund.

UC Press claims that these programs evolve “the OA model to benefit authors and the entire academic community.” On this, I suppose time will tell.

 

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