Open access (OA) scholarship is digital, online, and freely available to readers. Journal articles are the most common form of OA scholarship, but many scholarly books are OA as well.
Many OA works are also openly licensed, often using Creative Commons licenses. By applying an open license to their work, authors or copyright holders give readers permission to download, distribute, and sometimes translate or remix their work as long as credit is given to the creator.
The OA movement is a global initiative to make scholarship openly available for everybody to read and use. It is founded upon three important declarations that defined OA and its key principles and strategies:
The two main types of open access publishing model are Green Open Access and Gold Open Access.
Image source: Open Access Network. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Many funding agencies have adopted open access policies that require funding recipients to make their research freely accessible.
In Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Canadian Institute of Health Research Open Access Policy on Publications applies to grants awarded since May 1, 2015. "The objective of this policy is to improve access to the results of Agency-funded research, and to increase the dissemination and exchange of research results. All researchers, regardless of funding support, are encouraged to adhere to this policy."
While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to May 1, 2015 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.
The University of Victoria Libraries and our librarians, archivists, and staff are committed to open access scholarship and ensuring barrier-free access to scholarly content to the broadest possible community to increase its visibility, usage, and impact.
Read the UVic Libraries Open Access Statement of Commitment.
UVic Libraries works with publishers to arrange for waivers and discounts on article processing charges (APCs) to over 9,000 journals. Through these agreements, members of the UVic community can publish open access articles in select journals. There are two ways to explore them:
Open access scholarly journals are subject to the same rigorous peer review that subscription-based academic journals are, and some have high impact factors. However, they use different funding models than subscription journals. Many open access journals bill authors article processing charges (APCs) in order to make their articles open access. Open access journals that do not charge APCs are often called Diamond Open Access journals.
The Directory of Open Access Journals provides information about thousands of peer reviewed open access journals.
See our Journal Selection and Deceptive Publishing guide for help with choosing a high-quality open access journal for your publication.
Researchers who hold Tri-Agency grants may use those funds to pay article publishing fees (APCs) if they wish to publish in a fee-based open access journal. Open access fees are considered eligible expenses under the “Dissemination of Research Results” in the Tri-Agency Guide on Financial Administration.Researchers who are preparing Tri-Agency proposals should include APCs as part of their projected expenses. APCs vary substantially from publisher to publisher, but a good rule of thumb is to budget $2500 per article.
Following the Green Open Access route, you can share a version of your work in an open access repository (e.g., UVicSpace) or on your department website.
Archiving your work in a repository allows you to
comply with funders' open access mandates
preserve a copy of your work in perpetuity
generate a persistent link to your work that can be shared on social media and other sites.
A digital repository is an online collection of research. Most repositories are open access and may contain a range of scholarly outputs such as journal articles (including preprints and postprint versions), conference proceedings, reports, and more. Some repositories contain research outputs from many institutions and disciplines, e.g., Zenodo. Others are more specialized:
UVicSpace is UVic's institutional repository. By archiving your work in UVicSpace, you can follow the Green route to open access. This allows you to publish in subscription-access journals while complying with the Tri-Agency open access policy.
Some publishers allow you to archive the published version of your article in an institutional repository. Other publishers only allow you to archive the postprint (also called the accepted manuscript) version. This is the version of the article that has been formally accepted for publication, after peer review but before copyediting and layout. In either case, publishers often require an embargo to be placed on the article, often 12 months from the publication date. To find out which version of an article you're allowed to archive, search for the journal in the Open Policy Finder.
The library's Copyright and Scholarly Communication Office can help you archive your research outputs in UVicSpace. Email your current CV to scholcom@uvic.ca to get started.
For journals that do not allow self-archiving of peer-reviewed manuscripts, the Tri-Agency encourages authors to retain key rights through the use of a publication addendum (e.g., CARL Canadian Author Addendum) or by inserting text into the publishing agreement, for example:
[Journal] acknowledges that the researcher will be entitled to archive an electronic copy of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript for inclusion in UVicSpace. Manuscripts archived with UVicSpace may be made freely available to the public, via the internet, within 12 months of the official date of final publication in the journal.
If you are unsure whether your publishing agreement allows you meet your funder's open access mandate, email scholcom@uvic.ca.
Subject repositories collect and share research outputs related to a particular subject area. Preprint servers are subject repositories are designed for sharing preprints only.
Some well-known subject repositories include
The University of Victoria Dataverse Collection is UVic's institutional data repository. Visit the library's Scholarly Research Support page to learn more about sharing and publishing your research data.
Masters theses and PhD dissertations form a sizeable portion of scholarly research at most academic institutions. Graduate students have been submitting their theses and dissertations into UVicSpace since 2005. The collection is fully discoverable and accessible on the internet, and each title is indexed in the library catalogue.
The agencies believe that research data collected through the use of public funds should be responsibly and securely managed and be, where ethical, legal and commercial obligations allow, available for reuse by others. To this end, the agencies support the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) guiding principles for research data management and stewardship.
The agencies acknowledge the diversity of models of scientific and scholarly inquiry that advance knowledge within and across the disciplines represented by agency mandates. The agencies therefore recognize that there are legitimate differences in the standards for RDM among the disciplines, areas of research, and modes of inquiry that the agencies support.
UVic Libraries offers a number of services to support your data needs. We provide help from the moment you conceive of a project to the moment you publish about it – and long after.
The concept of Open educational resources (OER) emerged during a 2002 UNESCO Forum on Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. The initial concept was further developed as follows:
Open Educational Resources are defined as ‘technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes.’ They are typically made freely available over the Web or the Internet. Their principle use is by teachers and educational institutions to support course development, but they can also be used directly by students. Open Educational Resources include learning objects such as lecture material, references and readings, simulations, experiments and demonstrations, as well as syllabuses, curricula, and teachers’ guides. (Wiley, 2006)
Generally accepted to be:
and has an open license that allows others to:
Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute
at a low cost
which reduces the barriers to education
To learn more about open licensing, adopting or adapting textbooks, or creating open resources
Acknowledgements
Most of the contents from this section were adapted from Goldberg, E., & LaMagna, M. (2012). Open educational resources in higher education: A guide to online resources. College & Research Libraries News, 73(6), 334-337. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.73.6.8776
The Open Science guide brings together relevant information and materials from UVic Libraries and other sources to support your understanding and engagement with Open Science and Open Scholarship.
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