International Open Access Week runs from October 21 – 27; this year’s theme is focused on “Community over Commercialization.” Open Access Week celebrates the importance of making scholarship openly available to serve the best interests of the public and the academic community. The open publishing program at the University of Alberta Library has been driven by the same sense of service for many years.
Libraries around the world, including the U of A Library, are increasingly embracing the role of open publisher as an alternative to commercial publishing. Traditionally, scholarly publications have only been available to those who can pay and are therefore “closed” to everyone else. Though libraries pay for access, commercial publishers increase their prices at rates that outpace inflation. Many universities cannot keep up with increasing access costs, meaning researchers around the world are unable to access the research publications they require. Additionally, commercial publishers often charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) to authors who want to make their article openly available, making it difficult for researchers outside of elite research institutions to openly publish and share their work. By supporting open publishing, libraries can push for a better way, one that is free for researchers to publish, share and access scholarly material.
Open Journal Publishing
While many Canadian scholars publish with large, international corporations, more and more are choosing to work with non-profit open journal publishers based here in Canada instead. Canadian university libraries currently support ~400 active open journals and approximately 80% of these are diamond OA. This means that their articles are both free to publish (no APCs) and free to read.
The U of A Library’s publishing program was created in 2007 and currently supports 74 active journals; many of these are publications of Canadian learned societies or scholarly associations and some are based in U of A academic departments. Every journal hosted by the U of A Library is a diamond OA title.
Publishing Open Educational Resources
The U of A Library also supports the adoption, adaptation and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are learning, teaching and research resources that are openly shared with a license that allows for re-use and adaptation by others. OER can include open textbooks and other course materials.
The Library also partners with Open Education Alberta, a collaborative organization that supports OER publication and hosting for 13 Alberta post-secondary institutions, providing students and researchers across the province with free access to open textbooks, tutorials and other course materials.
By supporting open publishing the U of A Library is able to make research and learning materials available to our community as a free and open alternative to commercial resources.
For more information, please visit our Publishing at the Library website.
Thank you to the University of Alberta Library’s Scholarly Communications Team for authoring this post.
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