October 26, 2016. – As this 2016 International Open Access Week unfolds, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) wishes to reaffirm its support for open access (OA) as a means for enabling scholarly research results to be widely distributed and accessible to all sectors of the population.
CARL’s education and promotion efforts around open access are longstanding. We would like to acknowledge the work of a succession of Open Access Working Groups that, for over a decade, worked tirelessly to develop tools and resources to be used within Canadian universities in order to support local OA efforts.
In February of this year, CARL released the position paper CUSP: Canadian Universities and Scholarly Publishing, which highlighted a goal shared with university researchers and administrators “to enable research results to be as widely distributed and accessible as possible, internationally, in high quality publishing venues at the lowest possible costs.” CUSP also voiced CARL’s intention to collaborate on efforts to ensure the sustainability of scholarly communication, an outcome which we believe can and should be achieved within the context of maximizing open access.
In May 2016, we presented a webinar, Library and Research Services Supports for the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, in collaboration with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canadian Association of Research Administrators (CARA). This session showcased the variety of efforts being developed within Canadian university libraries and research offices to support researchers to comply with this policy. Of course, a large number of these services (such as hosting institutional repositories and educating authors on how to retain their rights when publishing) are beneficial to all authors, not just those seeking to comply with the new Tri-Council policy. .
CARL currently has several initiatives underway that advance recommendations of the CUSP paper, among them:
- A Scholarly Communication Roadmap which is being prepared by the Advancing Research Committee to guide and focus efforts in the next few years;
- Continued development of Portage, a research data management service and network of expertise, which supports the opening and sharing of research data;
- The Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group, which brings together key stakeholders from across the scholarly publishing landscape to explore sustainable publishing models and to work toward a collaborative framework;
- An upcoming national forum Where Next for Repositories?,to be co-hosted with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) on November 9, which aims to strengthen the role and momentum for a Canadian network of repositories within the context of a sustainable open scholarly communication system.
Finally, we would like to recognize the excellent work of our member institutions, as well as all the post-secondary institutions in Canada that have organized events and initiatives at their institutions to coincide with Open Access Week. A selection of these events can be seen in the Events section of the International Open Access Week website.
CARL’s members include Canada’s twenty-nine largest university libraries and two federal government institutions. Enhancing research and higher education is at the heart of our mission. CARL promotes effective and sustainable scholarly communication, and public policy that enables broad access to scholarly information.
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