The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the University of California system have agreed to begin a two-year trial of an open-access publishing pact that covers both author fees and subscription costs.

The agreement?follows a?similar arrangement?reached last month?with Jisc, the 156-university UK consortium.

The UC and Jisc experiences will be studied by PNAS, the official journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, to guide the development of PNAS¡¯ future open-access policies, said its executive editor, Diane Sullenberger.

For the California system ¨C which accounts for nearly 10 per cent of all US research output ¨C PNAS becomes the latest in a series of partnerships aimed at ending the bottlenecks in scientific sharing created by the longstanding use of subscription models in academic publishing.

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With other major partners that include?Elsevier?and the?Public Library of Science, about a third of all UC-authored articles are now covered by open-access agreements, said one of the system¡¯s lead negotiators, Jeffrey MacKie-Mason.

Under the agreement, UC expects to pay PNAS an annual publishing services fee of $55,000 (?40,000), covering an estimated 230 articles per year by California authors.

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The arrangement gives all UC students and researchers access to all PNAS content, similar to the terms that PNAS negotiated with Jisc.

PNAS ¡°will use data from these two pilots to evaluate the impact of such agreements and to inform future PNAS open-access policies¡±, Ms Sullenberger said.

PNAS said it also plans next month to begin accepting submissions for a new open-access journal, PNAS Nexus.

PNAS currently publishes more than 3,500 research papers annually, largely in the biological, physical and social sciences.

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The California system reached a major breakthrough this past March by reaching the agreement with Elsevier after a two-year negotiating standoff. That agreement requires UC to pay author fees in cases where its researchers lack the necessary funds from their own grant awards.

UC¡¯s agreements with PNAS and the others show ¡°that there are multiple paths toward an open-access science environment¡±, said Keith Yamamoto, the vice-chancellor for science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com