“Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research.” (SPARC Open Access)
For more general information on Open Access, see Peter Suber’s What is open access?.
The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) has published an Institutional Mobilization Toolkit to raise awareness of the challenges of the current publication model and develop materials to clarify issues in scholarly communication.
- An article, in its “version of record,” is immediately readable by anyone in the world with Internet access. Publishing your work in a subscription-based journal generally restricts its readership to persons affiliated with a university whose library can afford to subscribe to (or license online access to) the journal.
- Publishing an article as open access fulfills the OA requirements of most funding agencies. Some journals require authors to pay an article processing charge; $3,000 is not an uncommon fee. It can be a challenge for an author to pay such charges if they have chosen to publish in such a journal. The Canadian federal granting agencies do, however, allow grant funding to be used for payment of article processing charges to satisfy their Open Access policy. Laurentian University researchers can benefit from agreements with various publishers to offer discounted (or zero cost) APCs.
- SPARC Europe reviewed 70 studies through 2015, 46 of which found that publishing OA journal articles offers a citation advantage over non-OA journal articles.
- OA journals generally allow authors to retain their copyright; the author is normally asked to apply a Creative Commons (CC) license to the article. “Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that promotes and enables the sharing of knowledge and creativity throughout the world. The organization produces and maintains a free suite of licensing tools to allow anyone to easily share, reuse, and remix materials with a fair "some rights reserved" approach to copyright” (Creative Commons).
In 2015, the federal granting agencies (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC) announced a Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, which states that “Grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication.” Grant recipients can fulfill the open access requirements through the following routes:
- Online repositories: self-archiving an appropriate version of an article in an institutional or disciplinary OA repository, including Laurentian’s LU|Zone|UL.
- Journals: publishing an article in an OA journal (an article processing charge may apply); paying to have an article made OA in a hybrid journal.
The requirements regarding OA publishing, archiving and data archiving may differ among funding organizations. The Jisc Open Access Policy Finder provides a database of research funders’ open access policies.
To learn more about individual repositories, ROARMAP provides a registry for OA repository mandates and policies.
An institutional repository is a database with a set of services to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute a university's scholarly research in digital formats. Institutional repositories support the open access model of dissemination. Laurentian’s institutional repository LU|Zone|UL has distributed and preserved the scholarly work of the Laurentian community, including theses and doctoral dissertations, since 2007. Contributing your scholarly activity to LU|Zone|UL is one way to fulfill the open access requirements of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications.
- There is no charge to contribute articles to LU|Zone|UL.
- Your liaison librarian will help you by verifying that you are contributing the correct version of your work and that your article will be described and available from LU|Zone|UL.
- Shortly after your work is available on LU|Zone|UL, it will be readily available to find and read through search engines like Google Scholar.
- Most journals now allow self-archiving, though sometimes with an embargo period. An embargo period of up to one year is acceptable by the Canadian federal granting agencies. A document can be sent to LU|Zone|UL before the end of an embargo period, however, the document will not be made available from LU|Zone|UL until such time as the embargo is over.
- You may contribute your work to LU|Zone|UL as well as to a disciplinary repository such as PubMed Central Canada or arXiv.org; in fact, it is encouraged!
In addition to LU|Zone|UL, the Laurentian University Library and Archives contributes funding to the CRKN licensing consortium to support the OA publication of some 150 French-language and bilingual academic journals, many of which are Canadian, by Érudit, a consortium formed by Université de Montréal, Université Laval and UQAM. A similar arrangement exists for a series of high energy physics journals: LU contributes funding through CRKN to make them available in OA under the international SCOAP3 project.
The Laurentian University Library & Archives uses the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform to publish open access journals, including:
OJS supports a complete double-blind peer-reviewed workflow.
If you want to publish an OA journal at Laurentian University, contact the Library and Archives through your liaison librarian.