Canadian Universities Too Closed Minded on Open Access |
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Monday October 19, 2009
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This week is International Open Access Week with universities around the world taking stock of the emergence of open access as a critical part of research and innovation. The basic principle behind open access is to facilitate public access to research, particularly research funded by taxpayers. This can be achieved by publishing in an open access journal or by simply posting a copy of the research online. Canadian universities may benefit from far more public funding than their U.S. counterparts, but they have been much more reluctant to adopt open access mandates. While there are some exceptions - Athabasca University along with the library departments at York University and the University of Calgary have adopted open access policies - most have been strangely silent on the issue. Second, Canadian university publishers have been generally hostile toward open access. Leading university presses such as Oxford University Press and Yale University Press have experimented with open licences, but most Canadian presses have not. This is particularly troubling given the public dollars that support university publishers. Last year, the Canadian university presses received more than $780,000 in financial support from the Department of Canadian Heritage, $1.4 million from the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, and another $700,000 doled out from the Canadian Council for the Arts. Yet despite nearly $3 million in annual taxpayer support from those three sources alone, most university presses have opposed open access strategies. In fact, during the recently completed copyright consultation, the Association of Canadian University Presses signed onto a document that actively opposed a more flexible approach for fair dealing, a position otherwise broadly endorsed by the Canadian education community. The University of Alberta Press, which last year received $72,000 from Canadian Heritage and $54,000 from the Canada Council, told a roundtable in Edmonton that it opposed flexible fair dealing and special reforms to assist education, yet backed legislation to support the imposition of digital locks on books. The success of open access points to the power of merging public support for research with Internet-based dissemination. As the global community embraces its potential, Canadian universities should not be left trailing behind. Comments (6)
Gregg
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One too many words in your title, Professor... Should read, "Canada ... Too Closed Minded on Open Access". We need a politician with guts to say, "Here's the deal... Open Access or no funding!" |
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TO OPEN THEIR MINDS, INFORM THEM WHAT THEY NEED TO DO Michael's article is timely and welcome, but it is nonspecific about just what it is that Canadian universities are closed minded about. It's not about Open Access publishing. Those few Canadian universities that are journal publishers at all, are only very minor ones. The decision about whether and when (if ever) to convert to Open Access publishing is in the hands of the big international publishers (whose journals are also the ones to which access is most needed by users, both in Canada and in the rest of the world). Nor is Canadian universities making some of their scarce funds available to pay for Open Access publishing charges going to provide much Open Access either. For Canada, Open Access is about providing Open Access to Canada's own research output, so that all potential users worldwide can access, use, apply and build on it, not just those whose universities can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and so that the findings of the Canadian researchers who did the research, and their universities, can receive the full usage and impact that their work deserves. The way to make all this happen is for Canadian universities to mandate that the final draft of every research article their researchers publish, regardless of which journal it is published in, must also be deposited in the university's Open Access Institutional Repositories, to make the research freely accessible to all users online. That is what Canadian universities need to do in order to make all Canadian research output Open Access. That's what Harvard and Stanford and MIT (and 100 other universities and research funders worldwide -- but not Cornell, nor Athabasca nor York, but only the Library Department at University at Calgary) have already done. If you want Canadian Universities to open their minds to Open Access, you have to know what to put in their minds -- and it's about what they need to mandate that their own researchers put in their own repositories. |
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... I have to agree with the previous poster. University presses in Canada are not major publishers. Speaking for my own little world, most mathematicians and physicists put their papers, preprints and subsequent revisions on the arXiv and/or on their own personal webpages. There has been a concerted effort in the mathematical world not just for open access, but to ensure publishers allow us to keep our work on the web (even for books), and to keep the prices of publications low. Open access has won the war. There may be a few dinosaurs remaining, but the plot is very clear, it's an open access future. |
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Redalyc Under Open Access philosophy, Redalyc aims to contribute to the editorial scientific activity produced in and about Ibero-America making available for public consultation the content of 550 scientific journals of different knowledge areas: http://redalyc.uaemex.mx |
We want to enhance competition and investment in this country, and this is why we adopted this policy back in 2008 for the AWS spectrum. Let me say that the price went down by an average of 11% since then, and we will continue this way with the 700 megahertz spectrum. We launched consultation with the industry to make sure that we enhance competition and provide better choice and better rates for our consumers.
Last week I wrote about the National Post seeking $150 licences for posting short excerpts online. It appears that the paper has now dropped the system.
Mar.12/13Comments (1)
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