Scholarly communication

This document is intended to heighten the awareness of faculty and researchers to authors' rights and the benefits that can accrue from open access publishing methods.

Open Access encourages the unrestricted sharing of research findings with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. It ensures that individual scholars increase their readership and citation rates, and are thereby afforded the recognition they need to advance their careers. (See the article Researchers Benefit from Sharing).

There are two routes to open access:

1. publishing in an openly accessible journal, monograph etc.
2. archiving your work in a research repository such as TSpace, ArXiv etc.

More and more authors are signing agreements (author addendums) with journal publishers to retain rights to their own articles; rights to quote themselves, rights to post their own articles on their course pages or give copies to their students, rights to include articles in subsequent compilations, and rights to post articles to digital archives for increased readership and research impact. See the video about the benefits of using T-Space at the University of Toronto Libraries.

Open Access is gaining momentum around the world as policies of research funders and policy makers require that publicly funded research be publicly accessible.

Information for Faculty

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has issued an Intellectual Property Advisory advising scholars to retain their copyright.

Use the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum to ensure you retain your author copyright and afford the widest possible distribution and impact for your scholarly work. See their excellent two minute YouTube movie about the reasons for and ways of retaining individual author rights.

Use the SHERPA RoMEO website to find the copyright & self-archiving policies of all major journal publishers.

Use Creative Commons licenses on your work. These provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.

Improve the visibility of your work by submitting copies of your publications to an Open Access Repository, including the U of T's research repository, TSpace.

Heighten the impact of your work by publishing in Open Access Journals.

Open Access Initiatives at the University of Toronto

U of T Libraries hosted several events during Open Access Week 2009 and are planning events for Open Access Week 2010.

University Libraries host services for conferences and electronic journals. Any faculty or student journal can be hosted with us.

TSpace is the university's research repository.

U of T Libraries are giving global exposure to Local digital special collections.

As of November, 2009, graduate students are required to submit their electronic theses to T-Space, the university's research repository. This dramatically increases exposure and readership for their scholarship. For more information, please visit the School of Graduate Studies' e-thesis page.

Funding Agencies

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research require that all research papers from its funded projects are freely accessible online within six months of publication and that bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data be deposited into a public database immediately upon publication of research results.

Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has endorsed the principle of open access and is moving to increase awareness, pursue discussions with major stakeholders, and gradually incorporate open access provisions in research support programs.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires that its funded investigators deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central, NIH's online digital archive, for free public access within 12 months of journal publication. NIH also allows grant funds to be used to pay journal publication fees.

Learn More about Open Access

Harvard University Unanimously Votes 'Yes' for Open Access.

MIT faculty open access to their scholarly articles. MIT also pioneered the OpenCourseWare project offering free lecture notes, exams and other resources from more than 1,800 courses spanning the institute's entire curriculum. About a million students, self-learners, and educators from almost every country visit the site each month.

The Create Change website will help you understand the changing landscape and how it affects you and your research. It also offers practical ways to look out for your own interests as a researcher.

The Open Access Directory is a huge compendium of all things Open Access.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) maintains a site for those interested in pursuing open access publication or advocating for open access to others in the academic community, to grant-making institutions, or even to bodies of government.

Contact:
St. George:  Rea Devakos:   rea.devakos@utoronto.ca      416 946 0113
Scarborough: Sarah Forbes: sforbes@utsc.utoronto.ca     416-208-2720 
Mississauga: Pam King: pam.king@utoronto.ca     905-828-52323

Adapted, with permission from: Open Access at Memorial University
http://www.library.mun.ca/openaccess_2009.php.