On Tuesday, the University of California announced an agreement with Elsevier, “that achieves both of the university’s goals for all publisher agreements: (1) Enabling universal open access to all UC research; and (2) Containing the excessively high costs associated with licensing journals.”

The UC statement also noted, “the agreement restores as of April 1, 2021, UC’s direct online reading access to all previously subscribed Elsevier journals and some additional journals to which UC did not subscribe previously.”

“As someone who started covering the open access movement some 20 years ago, I have to say this agreement is a major milestone for OA in the US,” declares Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer. “And the reason is this deal involves two real titans in the scholarly communication field.

“The University of California accounts for ten percent of US research output, and they are a huge part of Elsevier’s customer and content base—in other words, UC consumes a lot of articles from Elsevier, and contributes a lot of research to Elsevier,” Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.