The Faculty Senate of the University of California system has introduced a new open access policy. Three campuses (Los Angeles, Irvine and San Francisco) will start implementing the policy effective November 1 of this year. The other UC campuses will start implementing the policy by November 1 of 2014. When fully implemented, it will address over 8,000 faculty and up to 40,000 publications annually.
The specifics involve an automatic licensing agreement with the UC system prior to publication of the articles. Individual faculty may request a waiver or delay of such deposits on a per article basis, or may opt out of the policy permanently. Copyright would remain with the author, but the articles would be publicly available from the UC repository, eScholarship, unless the author opts to place the article with another open access repository or in an open access publication.
The policy is quite short, so the next steps – where the University and the Academic Senate monitor the policy, develop any necessary practices to ease its implementation, and suggest any changes. With one campus (San Francisco) already with an open access policy, I am not surprised by the system-wide expansion of open access. Given the size of the system, I do not expect it to be easy or simple. But I do expect it will have a notable impact.
Pasco Phronesis 
SIMPLE WAY TO MAKE UC OA MANDATE WORK
Aside from the default copyright-reservation mandate with opt-out, always add an immediate-deposit clause without opt-out: http://j.mp/19EkaX5
The deposit need not be immediately made OA, but it needs to be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. While access to the deposit is embargoed, the repository can implement the eprint-request Button with which users can request and authors can provide the sprint with one click each: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy