There is some exciting news at the University of Ottawa as it has become the first major Canadian research university to announce a comprehensive open access strategy. As part of the announcement, the University has joined the Compact for Open Access Publishing.  It is the first non-U.S. school to do so, joining Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley.  The University of Ottawa open access initiative includes a commitment to progressively make all of the University’s scholarly publications freely available online through the University’s  repository, uO Research.  Key elements of the strategy are:

• an author fund to assist researchers in paying fees charged by publishers to make materials available under open access
• an institutional repository for University of Ottawa research
• funding support for open education resources
• funding for further research into the open access movement itself
• the development of an open access collection with the University of Ottawa Press

The University of Ottawa has already shown some open access leadership with open access books (In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law and Lessons from the identity trail: anonymity, privacy and identity in a networked society), journals (Open Medicine) and support for the initial launch of Creative Commons Canada.  This is a big step forward, one that will hopefully be emulated by all Canadian universities.