Open access in Canada

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"The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy." - The Digital Humanities Manifesto

Contents

Introduction

See also Institutional repositories, Open search and scholarly publishing and communication

Open access (OA) is an important scholarly publishing and communication phenomenon that generates considerable debate among scholars, publishers and librarians. As a full-fledged sociopolitical movement in the 21st century, OA is a critical issue for governments and businesses as society moves towards new research frameworks and legislation. Recurring issues in the discourse include whether OA is sustainable or financially viable in the long term and whether publicly-funded research projects should be freely-accessible to taxpayers immediately upon publication. OA is linked to other digital trends such as web 2.0 and social computing.

What is open access?

Open access (OA) refers to the free and open availability of scholarly research literature on the web with no restrictions. Open access to the scholarly literature is possible when researchers publish in OA journals, self-archive their research on personal websites or place it into digital repositories. However, merely making materials available online does not ensure that they will be found - or, their findability. Further research is needed by the library and information science community in order to bring OA materials together in a search space that is also open.

According to Ulrich's web, about ~25,000 peer-reviewed journals are published in all disciplines and all languages worldwide. As knowledge-output has been estimated at about ~2.5 million articles per year, most libraries at universities and research institutions - even the largest and richest libraries at Harvard and Yale - can only subscribe to a fraction of this information. If research articles were more freely available then the usage, impact, productivity and progress of research would be optimized. In the paper era there was no way to remedy this but in the web 2.0 era there is a way: Open Access provides free web-wide access to research journal articles, immediately and permanently.

A central tenet of OA is that information should be freely available to researchers (or consumers) who need it to do their work. In knowledge-based societies, information that is freely and openly-shared contributes to the robust health of economies. Blogs, wikis and other media are also representative of new models of easily-accessible, instantaneous scholarly publishing.

What is an OA publication?

According to the 2003 Bethesda Statement on Open Access, an open access publication is one that meets the following criteria:

  1. Author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access and license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies.
  2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository)."
    - 2003 Bethesda Statement on Open Access
  • Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals;
  • Community standards, rather than copyright law, will provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of published works.
  • The Berlin Declaration mentions, among other aspects, that "(OA) contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material."

Examples of 'non-textual' OA materials

Other definitions

According to the Canadian Stevan Harnad, OA is the free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles. There are two major roads to OA:

  1. the golden road of OA journal-publishing , where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all);
  2. the green road of OA self-archiving, where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all. The two roads to OA should not be confused or conflated; they are complementary.

OA self-archiving is not self-publishing nor is it online publishing with no quality controls (ie. peer review). OA is also not intended for publications where authors are being paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue.

Key figures and initiatives

OA leaders can be found in many countries around the world but a number of prominent Canadians are worth mentioning, for example, John Willinsky, Stevan Harnad and Heather Morrison. At the first Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting, three Canadians were involved: Leslie Chan; Jean-Claude Guédon and Stevan Harnad.

A 2007 OA initiative in biomedicine brought several Canadian physicians together over concerns of lack of editorial independence at the Canadian Medical Journal. The OA publishing initiative is called Open Medicine and represents a bold new direction for scholarly, open-access publishing in biomedicine. Prominent Canadians include Drs. Anita Palepu, Claire Kendall and Stephen Choi.

The most popular OA website is Open Access News, which is updated several times a day by the American academic and OA researcher Peter Suber. (see Open Access Overview and A Very Brief Introduction to OA.) Librarians interested in reading about library-related issues may find the Open Access (OA) Librarian blog worth a read. Other resources include Charles Bailey's bibliographies, American Scientist Open Access Forum and Open Access Archivangelism.

Open Access (OA) in Canada

In 2005, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council adopted open access in principle but, as of 2008, has not proposed a mandate. In 2006, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) proposed an OA mandate, adopting it in September 2007 (see OA Self-Archiving Policy). CIHR is the first North American public research funder to do so.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries / Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada leads a number of OA initiatives. As a founding member of SPARC, it provides basic information on OA and the Canadian context for it. CARL/ABRC libraries participate in an Institutional Repositories Project, which includes development of a portal, the CARL Metadata Harvester, hosted by the University of Calgary Library, with the metadata harvester coordinated by Simon Fraser University Library.

The CARL Metadata Harvester currently includes records from 17 repositories. A significant number of works on CARL's What's New Page involve open access. Some of its iniatives are directly supportive of OA such as its Brief to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council concerning Open Access and AlouetteCanada, the Open Canada Digitization Initiative. Other CARL initatives are indirectly relevant to OA, such as its Knowledge Dissemination Study.

Canadian leaders in OA

Canada’s involvement in OA can be traced back to the early 1990s.

In 1991, Jean-Claude Guédon of the Université de Montréal founded Surfaces, the first Canadian electronic scholarly publication. Guédon also served on the Board of Directors of the Open Society Institute's Information Program until 2006; OSI is a world leader in the OA movement. Guédon's In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing is a detailed, thoughtful analysis on the history of scholarly communications and has been translated into five (5) languages.

University of Toronto's Leslie Chan serves as the Associate Director of Bioline International, a not-for-profit electronic publishing service committed to providing OA to quality research journals published in developing countries, thus reducing the south to north knowledge gap. Bioline International assists local publishers with developing top-quality electronic platforms, including high metadata standards and working with abstracting and indexing services to enhance the impact of scientists in developing countries. Medknow's Journal of Postgraduate Medicine is an excellent example of the high quality of the work of Bioline and its publishing partners.

In 1989, Stevan Harnad founded one of the first "gold" OA journals, Psycoloquy. In 1993, he created BBSprints, an OA archive of preprints from Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Since 1990, his focus has been at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and as Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Harnad's students and collaborators also created Eprints, the first free OAI-compliant software for creating Institutional Repositories, which is now widely-used around the world. Harnad et al also provided the policy models for the Green OA self-archiving mandates by universities and funders that are now growing rapidly worldwide: see ROARMAP.

In 1997, Harnad created CogPrints, an early OA repository which was made OAI-compliant in 1999. During this period, Tim Brody, created Citebase, a citation-based, scientometric search engine as well as the worldwide Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Harnad's students and collaborators have amassed evidence of the usage and citation advantage of OA as a basis for promoting it. Harnad has moderated the American Scientist Open Access Forum since 1998. Links to his publications are here and his postings are archived on Open Access Archivangelism, and the American Scientist Open Access Forum. Harnad has also had a role in the Berlin Declaration.

OA advocates can be found at many Canadian university libraries but Kathleen Shearer, Coordinator of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Institutional Repository Project, exemplifies the growing leadership in OA. A graduate of the MLIS program at McGill, Kathleen became involved in advocacy for OA as a result of her work at CARL and for personal reasons:

"I have always believed that there would be tremendous benefits from a freer and more open exchange of knowledge, research knowledge or otherwise. Not only does access to knowledge allow people to make informed decisions about their lives, their governments, and their health, etc., but it also facilitates the creation of new knowledge. New knowledge is built on old. The problem with limiting access to knowledge is that it probably also limits knowledge creation, particularly so for knowledge that comes from collaborative work."

British Columbia context

UBC's John Willinsky is an international OA expert and advocate who divides his time between Stanford and UBC. John founded the Public Knowledge Project which developed Open Journal Systems now in use by OA publishers worldwide (more than 1,000 journals). OJS is managed as a collaboration between UBC and Simon Fraser University with support from the SFU Library.

Canadian libraries and library associations have been leaders in the OA movement. The British Columbia Library Association and the Canadian Library Association are noted on Peter Suber's Open Access Timeline as early adopters of resolutions on OA. Both resolutions were drafted by Heather Morrison, a noted librarian and open access advocate, who co-founded OA Librarian, along with Lesley Perkins, Andrew Waller, Marcus Banks, Dean Giustini and Anita Coleman. BCLA and CLA present strong support for OA in public policy consultations, such as the SSHRC Open Access Consultation, and the CIHR open access policy consultation. Morrison currently teaches an Open access course at the UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.

CIHR Funded Access

CIHR's mandate is stated in The CIHR Act: "to excel in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a strengthened Canadian health care system."

CIHR has a fundamental interest in ensuring that research outputs are available to a wide audience. Researchers, educators, decision makers and others rely on access to information (see CIHR's Policy on Access to CIHR-funded Research Outputs, which came into effect in January 2008) and the latest knowledge and research materials to make scientific discoveries, develop new technologies, and establish health-related standards and best practices.

CIHR's policy promoting access to research outputs rests on the foundation of the CIHR Act and reflects the core values articulated in CIHR's Blueprint for Health Research and Innovation, the organization's strategic plan, which states that: "the primary purpose of all research in the public domain is the creation of new knowledge in an environment that embodies the principles of freedom of inquiry and unrestricted dissemination of research results."'

Access to NIH-funded papers - 2008

In January 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced its revised Public Access Policy. It now requires researchers to deposit copies of final manuscripts into a peer-reviewed journal so that they may be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. This policy applies to journal articles resulting from research supported in whole or in part by direct funds from NIH. A manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication and includes all modifications from the publishing and peer-review process.

The NIH has provided a comprehensive set of resources to explain the details of the policy:

Libraries and universities in the US are working to help authors implement the revised NIH policy by helping authors to understand and negotiate their rights when publishing their work.

Other notable American scholarly papers

Librarians may also find the following links helpful:

The role of librarians

Academic librarians are among the most vocal of OA advocates partly because access to information is one of the central tenets of librarianship. OA librarians strive to remove barriers that undermine their efforts to provide access to scholarly information for their users.

Some major library associations have signed OA declarations or created their own. In 2004, the Canadian Library Association endorsed its own Resolution on Open Access; the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association developed a Scholarly Communications Toolkit. The Association of Research Libraries has recently documented the need for increased access to scholarly information, and is a founder of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

At many universities, libraries house institutional repositories where faculty can load their own self-archived articles. CARL has a program to develop institutional repositories at all Canadian university libraries. Some academic libraries are starting to publish their own journals, such as the Journal of Insect Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library; others host and/or provide technical support. In Canada, many libraries are providing hosting services for journals, including the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Alberta, Athabasca University, and many more.

A recent study by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) found that 65% of libraries surveyed either were offering journal hosting services, or planning to do so. A summary of the finds and link to download the study can be found on this post on Open Access News.

Many libraries promote OA materials through their websites, including OA journals in library catalogues or setting up automated searching for OA items. Some librarians are not in favour of full OA fearing that existing library funding for subscriptions may be removed or used to fund institutional repositories. Still others are concerned about the long-term sustainability or uncertainty associated with OA business models.

Findability

While there is much discussion about OA, there is insufficient discussion about how these materials will be found in an OA world. Will librarians rely on Google scholar or the principles of web 3.0 - or some as-of-yet to be developed search tool?

For some discussion about open search spaces and findability on the web see the The Search Principle Blog.

Select OA publishers

Lists of open access journals

References

  1. American Library Association. Open access to research. Washington, DC: The Association, 12 Nov 2004.
  2. Anderson R. Author disincentives and open access. Ser Rev. 2004 30(4):288–91.
  3. Cozzarelli NR. An open access option for PNAS. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2004 Jun 8; 101(23):8509.
  4. Davis P, Ehling T, Habicht O, How S, Saylor JM, and Walker K. Report of the Cornell University Library task force on open access publishing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Task Force on Open Access Publishing, 9 Aug 2004.
  5. [Evans JA. Open access and global participation in science. Science 2009 Feb 20; 323(5719): 1025.]
  6. Frank M, Reich M, and Ra'anan A. A not-for-profit publisher's perspective on open access. Serv Rev. 2004 30(4):281–7.
  7. Harnad S, Brody T, Vallieres F, Carr L, Hitchcock S, Gingras Y et al. The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access. Ser Rev. 2004 30(4):310–4.
  8. International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. IFLA statement on open access to scholarly literature and research documentation. The Hague, Netherlands: The Association, 2004.
  9. Kumaran M. CHLA/ABSC 'Open Access' Factsheet. May 2008.
  10. Macmillan Publishers. News: Embo and NPG announce a new online publication: molecular systems biology. Basingstoke Hampshire, England, UK: Nature Publishing Group, 7 Sep 2004.
  11. Medical Library Association. MLA statement on open access. Chicago, IL: The Association, 2003.
  12. Morrison H, Waller A. Open access and evolving scholarly communication: an overview of library advocacy and commitment, institutional repositories, and publishing in Canada. College & Research Libraries News. September 2008
  13. Morrison H, Waller A. Open access for the medical librarian. JCHLA/JABSC 2006;27(3):pp. 69-73.
  14. Morrison H. Canadian Leadership in the Open Access movement series. 2008
  15. ROARMAP - Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies. Southampton, UK: University of Southampton.
  16. Solomon DJ. Medical Education Online: a case study of an open access journal in health professional education
  17. Swan A, Brown S. Open access self-archiving: an author study. Truro, UK: JISC Committee for the Information Environment; Open Access Institute; Key Perspectives.
  18. The Royal Society. Royal society position statement on "open access". 2005.
  19. UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Scientific publishing: free for all? UK: House of Commons, The Stationery Office Limited, 2004.
  20. UK Research Councils. Access to research outputs. The Councils.
  21. Vogel G, Enserink M. Information sharing. Europe steps into the open with plans for electronic archives. Science. 2005 Apr 29; 308(5722):623–4.
  22. Washington DC Principles Coalition. Washington DC principles for free access to science. Washington, DC: The Coalition, 2004.
  23. Willinsky J, Mendis R. Open access on a zero budget: a case study of Postcolonial Text. Information Research 2007 12(3).
  24. Willinsky J. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambrdige, MA: MIT Press, 2006
  25. Wikipedia. Open access. 2008.
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