Davis Open Access Book Fund
We regret that the Davis Open Access Book Fund has been discontinued, effective October 16, 2025, due to campus budget cuts.
If you or someone you know would like to make a philanthropic contribution of support to help us resume the library’s Open Access Book Fund, please contact Jessica Nusbaum, Director of Communications and External Relations, jlnusbaum@ucdavis.edu
Funding for Open Access Monographs
From 2018 through October 15, 2025, the library offered funding support for author fees to publish open access monographs — first, through UC Davis’ participation in a five-year national pilot, TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), which was designed to help cultivate a thriving ecosystem of high-quality, peer-reviewed, and freely accessible scholarly books; and subsequently through the library’s own Davis Open Access Book Fund.
In total, the library provided funding for 23 open access books by UC Davis Academic Senate and Federation members.
UC Davis Funded Open Access Books
About the Program
The Davis Open Access Book Fund was open to current UC Davis Academic Senate faculty and Academic Federation members. Eligible individuals were limited to one grant.
The fund provided up to $15,000 for open access monographs that were:
- Published by a press that participated in the TOME initiative (see the list of participating publishers);
- Unpublished as of the application date;
- Published in industry-standard, DRM-free digital formats (to include at least ePub and/or PDF with a text layer) at the time of first release;
- Published with industry-standard metadata reflecting the text’s open access availability;
- Fully indexed for searching on the web; and
- Published under a Creative Commons license at the time of first release.
As part of their application, authors were required to submit a copy of their book proposal and their signed publishing agreement.
In order to receive funds for open access publishing of the monograph, both the author and the publisher were required to sign an amendment in which the publisher committed to:
- Provide the final digital files for the monograph, as well as any individual multimedia files used in its composition, for deposit in the University of California repository eScholarship
- Distribute digital files of the book (PDF and ePUB3 where possible) on one or more of the following platforms immediately upon publication:
- JSTOR
- OAPEN
- MUSEOpen
- HathiTrust Digital Library
- Acknowledge the funding support through the UC Davis Library in the front matter of all editions of the book.
Frequently Asked Questions
By choosing to publish open access, readers everywhere will be able to read and learn from your book — free of charge and without delay.
See what other UC Davis authors had to say about how open access publication expanded the reach of their works.
The University of California libraries have launched pilot programs with the University of California Press and Duke University Press to support UC-affiliated authors who choose to publish their monographs open access. Through these three-year pilots, UC authors publishing monographs with the two participating presses will be offered the opportunity to make their books open access, with funding provided by the UC libraries (through UC’s California Digital Library).
The UC Davis Library may resume funding for open access books published by other university presses should philanthropic support for the program become available in the future.
No, it is unrelated. The UC Open Access Policies apply only to scholarship published in scholarly journals.
The TOME Fund was part of a five-year national pilot that UC Davis participated in from 2018 to 2022. The Davis Open Access Book Fund was its local successor initiative. Through this fund, the UC Davis Library aimed to support open access publication of up to three scholarly monographs by campus authors each year.
With limited resources available, the library was unable to support manuscripts submitted to commercial publishers.
The University of California provides partially or full funding support for open access publishing in many journals through UC systemwide agreements with publishers.