I think this is great, but another way UCLA could put its money where its mouth is would be to publicly commit to giving higher weight to OA vs Elsevier publications when making hiring/tenure decisions. That is, a potential hire should not be penalized because they opted not to submit their paper to an Elsevier journal.
This has much a much smaller effect than you think (at least in the departments I'm familiar with) because very little attention is paid to venue if it's research older than a few months, in which case citations and your ability to sell the research is taken much more seriously.
Your (unspoken) job as a tenure track professor is to raise money via grants and get students excited to do research and apply to join your group. A professor bringing in 4x the NSF grant money of a professor getting published in top journals/conferences is always going to get the higher priority. That's the reality of academia.
I've worked with professors considered to be the top of their departments who were completely incompetent but they were amazing at grant writing and selling their work. They brought in way more money to the school than anyone else so they were rewarded for it. :/
Aren't hiring decisions usually handled by the department? This seems like it would be hard to implement because the pool of people who are going to make hiring decisions over a span of several years would basically be every professor in the school. I mean the admin could send an email saying "don't penalize OA pubs over Elsevier pubs" but (1) that's a hard rule to follow even if you're trying in earnest, (2) you have to expect a great chunk of hiring committee members aren't going to follow this directive, and it'd be impossible to tell whether they did.
Came here to post this, and saw you already did. Until the incentives actually align against Elsevier, asking faculty to play nice isn't going to work. Tenure is hard enough; just because they say "publish or perish" doesn't mean the "perish" part is optional.
