Open Access at Concordia

• Spectrum: Concordia University's Research Repository
  
  
  
  • October 20, 2009: Press release for Spectrum's launch
  
  
• Open Access at Concordia: A Report for the Office of Research
  The Office of the Vice-President of Research and Graduate Studies recently commissioned a discussion paper on Open Access at Concordia.



• Open Access at Concordia: Arts & Science Faculty Council Presentation
  October 13, 2009: the University Librarian, Mr. Gerald Beasley, gave a presentation at the Arts & Science Faculty Council on Open Access at Concordia.



• Open Access FAQ for Faculty
  

  Open Access at Concordia: What it Means to You and Your Research
  A Quick Reference Card that covers most of the issues brought forward by Faculty members following recent presentations at the Faculty Councils on Open Access at Concordia by Mr. Gerald Beasley, the University Librarian.

• The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum helps you secure your rights as the author of a journal article:

Before your publish, the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes (available in English and French).


• Using the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum
  This explanatory brochure provides context and instructions for using SPARC Canadian Author Addendum (available in English and French).

Open Access in Canada

The following agencies have decided to support Open Access in the following ways:

• Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR):
  According to their Policy on Access to Research Outputs:

  All grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward require grant recipients to make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through the Publisher's website (Option 1) or an online repository as soon as possible and in any event within six months of publication (Option 2).

• National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI):
  NRC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed, NRC-authored publications and technical reports in their institutional repository called the NRC Publications Archive (NPArC).
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC):
  SSHRC has created an Aid to Open-Access Research Journals programme where:

  Funds will be awarded to help defray the costs of publishing scholarly articles [in Open Access journals]. Grants are to be considered a contribution to the journal's operating costs for production and distribution.

• Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF):
  According to their Policy on Access to Research Outputs:

  As of October 1st, 2008, individuals and teams who receive funding from the Foundation for research and related activities are required to make every effort to ensure that the results of their research are published in open access journals (freely available online) or in an online repository of published papers, within six months after initial publication.

• Fonds de la recherche en santé Québec (FRSQ):
  According to their Policy regarding open access to published research outputs:

  For new awards or grants issued as of January 2009, awardees or grant holders are encouraged to make all possible efforts to have their peer-reviewed publications posted on open-access Web sites at their earliest convenience, ideally no later than six months after publication or presentation. This can be achieved via the publisher's Web site (in the case of articles) or that of the organizer of the event (in the case of scientific conventions), or via online repositories.

• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC):
  Open Access policy is in development.

What is Open Access?

According to Peter Suber:

Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

Other definitions can be found here:

• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

Why is Open Access important?

Open Access is important because of:

• Increased access:
  Open Access initiatives take advantage of modern communications technology to make scholarly information more accessible and afforable. As a result, Open Access publications enjoy a wider audience. This facilitates a greater sharing of knowledge and can increase the impact and value of scholarly activity.
  
  An excellent example is MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) which is a "web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.".
  
  
• Fairness to the public:
  The majority of the research undertaken in Canadian universities and colleges is publicly funded. Open Access initiatives acknowledge this financial support and recognize the public's right to access research findings paid for by their taxes. As Peter Suber explains the argument:

  If the research papers based on taxpayer-funded research are locked away in conventional journals that require payments for access, then taxpayers will end up paying twice for the same research.

How to support Open Access

There are many ways to support Open Access:

• Deposit journal articles, or other research output, in Open Access repositories:
  There are both subject repositories, like Pubmed Central, and institutional repositories, like the upcoming Concordia Institutional Repository: Spectrum. To find out if a publisher allows the self-archiving of research articles in an institutional repository, consult Sherpa/RoMEO (publisher copyright policies & self-archiving).
  
  
• Publish in Open Access journals:
  Open Access journals make articles freely available immediately upon publication. Consult the Directory of Open Access Journals.
  
  
• Publish in hybrid Open Access journals:
  Some publishers make articles immediately available to the public if the author pays an additional Open Access fee. Every publisher has different terminology to describe these policies. ("sponsored article" (Elsevier), "open choice" (Springer), "funded access" (Wiley), and "authorchoice" (ACS)).
  
  
• Retain copyright:
  According to the CAUT, "Without copyright ownership, academic staff can lose control of their own work and may no longer be entitled to email it to students and colleagues, post it on a personal or course web page, place it in an institutional repository, publish it in an open access journal or include it in a subsequent compilation". Before your publish, use the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum to secure your rights as the author of a journal article. The addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes.
  
  

Find out more about Open Access

Keep up with the Open Access movement through the following Web sites:

• Open Access News - A blog covering the major developments in Open Access.
• Greater Reach for Your Research: Resources for Authors - The Canadian Association of Research Libraries' web page on important resources for authors about institutional repositories, copyright, etc.
• SPARC Open Access Newsletter - A free monthly newsletter with news and analysis of the Open Access movement.
• SPARC - News and resources from an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.
• Create Change Canada - Created by ARL and SPARC, this site examines new opportunities in scholarly communication. The site is adapted for the Canadian context thanks to the participation of CARL.
• Open Access Directory - A wiki with factual lists of Open Access resources
• OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook) - Highlights Open Access developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies.
• Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.) - provides an overview of open access concepts, and presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature.

The following podcasts shed light on various aspects of Open Access:

• Podcast: Open Access – Harvard’s success story with Robert Darnton (time: 23 mins) - Interview with Professor Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library and trustee of New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA) about Harvard University's adoption of an open access policy for all its research papers. [October 2009]
• Podcast: Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact (time: 1h 1 min) - This presentation given by David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe, describes current developments within the scholarly communications landscape and provides an indicator of possible future directions. [August 2009]
• Podcast: Research in the open: How mandates work in practice (time: 32 mins) - Open access mandates are one of a number of important tools for ensuring that publicly funded outputs are more easily and more quickly available to other researchers and to the general public. [May 2009]
• Podcast: Open Access and the Institutional Repository (time: 26 mins) - Interview with Brigham Young University Scholarly Communications Librarian Jeff Belliston, on how Open Access can bring broader impact and exposure for scholarship--especially if scholars deposit their work in an institutional repository. [February 2009]
• Podcast: Opening Up to Open Access - Gavin Yamey MD, Senior Editor of PLoS Medicine and Consulting Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, shares his experiences in the open access movement and explores possible avenues for its expansion to other fields, with a focus on the social sciences and humanities. [March 2007]
• Part 1 (time: 1h 17 mins)
• Part 2 (time: 23 mins)

Further readings on Open Access:

• The Effect of Open Access and Downloads ('hits') on Citation Impact: A Bibliography of Studies. [last updated October 15, 2009]
• Harnad, S.; Brody, T.; Vallieres, F.; Carr, L.; Hitchcock, T.; Gingras, Y.; Oppenheim, Cl; Haijem, C.; and E. R. Hilf (2008). The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update. Serials Review, 34 (1), 36-40.
• CAUT Intellectual Property Advisory: Retaining Copyright in Journal Articles. [July 2008]
• SPARC/Science Commons. (2008). Open Doors and Open Minds: What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution.
• Willinsky, John. (2006). The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press.
• Willinsky, John. (2005). The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science . First Monday, Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, 10 (8) August, 2005.

Search for Open Access content

Other Search Services that Index Open Access Content:

• Google and Google Scholar - Google Scholar indexes open access articles, identifying them within a results list with a green arrow. While not all articles found on Google or Google Scholar include free full-text, Google searches many open access repositories in addition to proprietary content.
• Scirus - Scirus identifies itself as a comprehensive science-specific search engine. Scirus searches over 480 million science-specific Web pages, including preprint servers, digital archives, repositories and patent and journal databases.
• Scientific Commons - a project of the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), which indexes and searches nearly 1000 repositories and millions of publications with the aim of providing comprehensive scientific knowledge.
• DRIVER (Europe) - Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research attempts to create a pan-European umbrella organization for digital repositories. Co-financed by the European Commission, DRIVER allows users to search repositories from across the European continent in 25 different languages.
• Arrow (Australia) - Australian Research Repositories Online to the World indexes and searches over 260, 000 Australian research outputs, including: theses; preprints; post-prints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures. ARROW indexes items based on metadata harvested from the institutional repositories by the National Library of Australia.
• IDEAS/RePEc - Internet Documents in Economics Access Service (IDEAS) for Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) includes open access working papers, book chapters and software components. The service has been made possible through the collaborative effort of volunteers worldwide.

Open Access Repositories:

• arXiv.org - An open access repository comprising of e-prints in physics and its related disciplines, such as mathematics, non-linear sciences, and computer science. arXiv is owned and maintained by Cornell University and partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
• Cogprints - a repository comprised of self-archived works predominantly in the areas of the cognitive sciences, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, biology, medicine, and anthropology. The archive resides and is maintained by the University of Southampton.
• E-LIS - An international open access archive for preprints, postprints and other documents in the field of library and information science.
• NDLTD - Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations is a collaborative project between universities worldwide, which disseminates and preserves electronic theses and dissertations.
• HAL (France) - Hyper Article on Line is designed for authors to deposit their research, and thereby offer publicly available scholarly documents from all academic fields. The repository is run through CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in France. Registration is required to contribute to HAL.

Directories:

• OpenDOAR - Directory of Open Access Repositories - a directory of academic open access repositories. Maintained by the University of Nottingham, this site lists institutional and subject-based repositories, while also providing a service to search the contents of these repositories.
• Directory of Open Access Journals - Direcotry of free, full-text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. There are now over 4300 journals in the directory.