Open Access Materials Policy
“Open Access (OA) is a model of scholarly communication that promises to greatly improve the accessibility of results of research. In general terms, scholarly research that is published in open access is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (although it does require that proper attribution of works be given to authors)” Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).
Championing OA is a strategic priority for Western Libraries, and this supports the value of equal access to information, as described in Values Guiding Collections Activities in Western Libraries’ Collections Strategy.
While OA materials are free to read, they are not free to create. Western Libraries’ support for open access gives organizations the funds they need to produce and maintain OA materials. This support includes institutional memberships with OA publishers or organizations that develop open infrastructure. Memberships with publishers often provide a discount or full payment of the article processing charges (APCs) for Western’s researchers. They may also provide 'freemium' access to OA content, such as MARC records to promote access to OA content. Memberships with organizations that develop open infrastructure often include an advisory role for the member institution and access to their platforms or tools.
Decisions about which memberships to support and promote to researchers are made by the Western Libraries Open Access Working Group, which includes librarians from the Collections and Content Strategies and Research and Scholarly Communication units. In these decisions, the group considers the following criteria and considerations.
Criteria for Open Access memberships
Western Libraries will consider memberships or other financial support for OA initiatives that meet these criteria:
- Membership should send a clear message of support for organizations and business models that seek to shift scholarly communications away from commercial or closed access models of for-profit publishing and scholarly infrastructure.
- Initiatives must have transparatent and viable business models.
- The subjects covered must be relevant to Western's scholars.
- The initiative should adhere to best practices for scholarly publishing, such as those provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
- For memberships that require APCs, the membership should provide good value for money. For example, a reasonable fee based on the numbr of articles that Western's researchers publish.
- Memberships that provide APC discounts for hybrid journals will not be considered, even if the membership also provides APC discounts for fully OA journals. Hybrid journals are those that require a susbscription to access all content but also request APC payments from authors who wish to make an individual article open.
- Western Libraries is not expected to cover the (full or partial) cost of APCs.
Special consideration will be given to:
- Venues in which Western's researchers are contributing or publishing.
- Initiatives that support scholars in traditionally under-funded disciplines, such as the Humanities or Social Sciences.
- Initiatives that demonstrate a commitment to accessibility, privacy, equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization.
- Organizations and initiatives that align with Western's mission and strategic priorities.
As many large journal publishers are adopting Read+Publish and Subscribe to Open agreements we continue to assess how these deals align with the above criteria. Since these agreements also include access to subscribed content there are additional factors to consider.
