Open Access to Canadian Research

Canada can increase the visibility and impact of its research by requiring all researchers supported by the Canadian taxpayer to make the published results of their research (and research data), freely available to everyone, everywhere, with an embargo period of no more than 6 months. This step has already been taken or started by other countries — for example, all research councils in the UK require OA to funded research, and the U.S. is considering the Federal Research Public Access Act. Global open access has enormous benefits to the world, and also to Canada, as we are currently a major importer of published research. This maximizes the value of the research dollar for the Canadian taxpayer — any research which is publishable (i.e. not held back for commercialization purposes) is available to all Canadian business — and also all researchers everywhere, so that another researcher can leverage our original investment and build on our early results. The link below is to the earliest of the major international open access statements, the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Of the 16 original signatories to BOAI, 3 are Canadian, just a few of the Canadian open access leaders whose contributions are recognized worldwide.

Comments

harnad — 2010–05–16 06:26:45 EDT wrote

INTEGRATE GOVERNMENTAL OPEN ACCESS MANDATE WITH UNIVERSITY OPEN ACCESS MANDATES

Research funder open–access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open–access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing: Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets — as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.

Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer–reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for institutional and funder record–keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.

As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open–access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt–outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRss under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

patrickgwelch — 2010–05–16 14:34:32 EDT wrote

Strong agreement with the comments/suggestions of both hgmorrison and harnad.

hgmorrison — 2010–05–16 22:51:52 EDT wrote

This is to second Stevan Harnad's expert advice. Canada is well positioned for a university–based deposit system, thanks to the CARL Institutional Repository system. Several Canadian universities (Athabasca, Concordia, University of Ottawa) already have complementary OA policies of their own. More are likely to follow suit in the near future. Still, federal leadership, especially leadership to develop optimal policy as Harnad outlines above, would be most helpful in moving Canada in this direction.

EdtheTed — 2010–05–25 09:10:05 EDT wrote

Does this mean that if a professor researches and gets an article accepted for publication, they are supposed to deposit that article into a “public access” area? Why would the journal allow that? If Journals allowed everyone to publish all their articles publicly, then might they not lose their subscription base?

My tour of the US of A « Gulliver Turtle's Blog » — 2010–05–28 12:32:49 EDT wrote

[…] in Canada right now. I'm calling on my peeps in Canada to vote for open access to research in Canada's Digital Economy Consultation. Meanwhile, down under there's been great progress with the Australian government making a […]

datalibre.ca · Please vote — Open Access to Canada's Public Sector Information and Data — 2010–06–10 12:26:24 EDT wrote

[…] your few seconds of your time could open up our data resources. You will also see a complimentary Research Data and improved access to publicly–funded data submissions that could also use some votes while you […]

datalibre.ca · Open Data — Vote & Submit — 2010–06–19 09:41:41 EDT wrote

[…] 3. Open Access to Canadian research […]

hgmorrison — 2010–07–08 12:42:32 EDT wrote

In response to Ed the Tech:

Let's turn this question around. After the Canadian taxpayer pays for research to be conducted, why would we allow the author to give away all rights to view the results to a publisher?

Another important point is that there is no evidence that public access impacts on the subscription model. In physics, there has been close to 100% author self–archiving for open access for more than a decade; no subscription cancellations have been attributed to this.

Finally, the business model for scholarly publishing is in the process of change. For example, the open access PLoS One is anticipated to become the world's largest research journal sometime this year. Canada is a leader in open access publishing; for example, the open source Open Journal Systems, used by more than 5,000 journals around the world, was developed right here in Canada. The number of fully open access, peer–reviewed journals in the world is already over 5,000 titles, and this area is growing by more than 2 titles per day.