Open Access

UPEI's OA author APC discounts

What is Open Access?

'Open Access' to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole." The are many ways in which you can practice open access, from open lab notebooks to creating open textbooks. Consult these resources for additional explanations of open access:

• Open Access Week 2010 (video) – a one-minute animated video developed by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and McGill Libraries to describe the concept of open access.
• Open Access Overview  by Peter Suber  
• What is Open Access? -  PhD Comic Video
• Open Access: What's with all the colors?  - the "Green" and "Gold" models of open access explained.

Why does Open Access matter to me?

The Right to Research Coalition lists many ways in which open access impacts faculty and students:

For faculty and researchers:

• better visibility and higher impact for your scholarship
• knowledge sharing
• new research partners can be identified

For Students:

• If your professors can’t read it, they can’t teach it
• It removes the barriers of high journal subscription costs, which puts smaller institutions at a greater disadvantage 

Open Access at UPEI 

• IslandScholar - UPEI's open access institutional repository of faculty publications and graduate student theses/projects. (The presentation slides from the October 24, 2012 IslandScholar 2.0  launch event are available as a PDF file.)
• Open Access & Dissemination of Research Output Policy (Passed by UPEI Senate, February 2012)
• UPEI Open Textbooks Project and UPEI Texbook Working Group Interim Report 2014
• Article Processing Charges (APC) discounts
• Pressbooks: an Open Educational Resources publishing platform
• Data@UPEI: data repository and data management planning tool

Open Access Publishing

• ​​​Greater Reach for Your Research: Resources for Authors - this list of resources, compiled by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, includes the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum, Greater Reach for Your Research: Expanding Readership Through Digital Repositories and Create Change Canada.
• Predatory Publishing
  • How to Assess a Journal -  a guide created by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries
  • Evaluating Journals - contains tools and advice for evaluating journals both OA and subscription-based,  including how to identify predatory publishers
  • Predatory Publishers - (Scholarly Communications, University of Ottawa) provides a checklist to critically evaluate a publisher's legitimacy
  • ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit: Evaluating Journals - includes resources for identifying predatory publishers
  • Think. Check. Submit. -  a tool that helps researchers identify trusted journals for their research through a series of questions
• Citations Impacts of open access
  • OpCit Project - A wealth of information about the impacts of Open Access, including an up-to-date list and summary of research articles on the effect of open access and downloads on citation impact and related topics.
• Funding Agency Policies
  • Tri-Agency Open Access Policy Announcement (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC February 2015)
  • See the guide Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications: Quick answers! (pdf), May 2015, from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries

Open Data

Open data is defined as "structured data that is machine-readable, freely shared, used and built on without restrictions" (Government of Canada, 2018). More information about open data can be found at:

• datalibre.ca - a list of Canadian open data sites
• Open Data Portal - Government of Canada
• re3data.org - registry of research data repositories
• NRC Gateway to Research Data 
• GeoGratis - Natural Resources Canada
• CANSIM - Statistics Canada's key socioeconomic database
• Dataset Search - Google's beta (2018) search engine for open raw data sets

Open Science

Open science is the idea of increased transparency of research, research methods, data, and publications. 

Making Open Science a Reality  (pdf) -  OECD 2015

News About Open Access

• Lewis, C. (2018). The Open Access Citation Advantage: Does It Exist and What Does It Mean for Libraries? Information Technology & Libraries, 37(3), 50–65. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v37i3.10604
• Li, Y., Wu, C., Yan, E., & Li, K. (2018). Will open access increase journal CiteScores? An empirical investigation over multiple disciplines. PLoS ONE, 13(8), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201885
• Kramer, D. (2018). Open access at a crossroads. Physics Today,  https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.2.20181011a
• Else, H. (2018). Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions. Nature, 561(7721), 17–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06178-7
• Open Access Tracking Project (OATP): Remixed Feed
• Responses to Elsevier's regressive article-sharing policy
  • New Policy from Elsevier impedes Open Access and Sharing  (COAR - Confederation of Open Access Repositories May 20, 2015)
  • Why Doesn't Elsevier State the Truth, Openly (Stevan Harnad May 21, 2015)

Selected Resources on Open Access

• Grasping What Is Already Within Immediate Reach: Universal Open Access Mandates by Stevan Harnad, ACCESS 2009 Conference Presentation, Charlottetown PEI.
• Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook - OASIS is a "sourcebook" on OA for researchers, librarians, publishers, administrators, students, and the public. Resources include Briefing Papers, Guides and Overviews, Videos, and Presentations.
• Digital Scholarship Toolbox - CAUL/CBUA Scholarly Communications Committee

Open Access Week 2018

• The Real Cost of Research Exhibit Data [Google Sheet]
• Comparison Posters Data [Google Sheet]