The Library is guided by the following overarching considerations when investing in open access resources:

1. the fundamental definition of open access: free, unrestricted online access to research outputs
2. the newest recommendations from the Budapest Open Access Initiative, particularly:
   • the need to host OA research on open, community controlled infrastructure (e.g. Directory of Open Access Books, Open Journal Systems, Erudit)
   • the importance of OA models which:
     • benefit all regions of the world
     • are controlled by academic/community organizations
     • avoid concentrating OA literature in commercially dominate journals
     • move away from read-and-publish agreements
3. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, particularly its call to invest in open science infrastructures and services:
   • “Non-commercial infrastructures, including computing facilities and digital public infrastructure and services supporting the open science approach. These should facilitate ensuring the long-term preservation, stewardship and community control of research products, including scientific information, data, source code and hardware specifications, co-operation among researchers and the sharing and reuse of research products.”

Investment criteria

In addition to the broad, over-arching guidance provided by UNESCO and BOAI, it is important to apply more specific criteria to guide selection processes. Recognizing the variations across open access platforms and infrastructure in terms of features, functions and complexity, we recommend adopting both mandatory and preferred criteria. 

Mandatory criteria

Note that not all of these criteria may be relevant to a particular product/platform: 

• Publications must be fully open access with no end-user fees: 
• Must meet the SPARC definition of open access: “… the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” 
  • Publications/platforms should use Creative Commons licensing, ideally with the lowest level of restrictions on reuse e.g. CC-BY 
  • Publications may not: 
    • Be hybrid, i.e. segments of a closed publication are made openly accessible after the author pays a special fee in addition to the institutional subscriber fee 

• Platforms and content must comply with accessibility regulations 
• Publishers should commit to best practices for scholarly publishing, such as those provided by DOAJ, COPE, and OASPA 
• Provider’s platform is interoperable, discoverable, and usable 
• Publications/platforms must provide usage statistics or other indicators of relevance 
• Publishers should provide clear instruction and support for Brock authors claiming discounts/no APCs under the terms of publishing agreements 
• APC agreements must not present burdensome workflows for Collections employees 
• Provider must be transparent with financial statements

Preferred criteria

• Strong uptake by Brock authors, as demonstrated by publishing patterns 
• Non-profit/non-commercial venues  
• Providers are scholar-led and/or community-controlled 
• Engagement in advocacy for open  
• Demonstrated focus on equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization 
• Support for researchers/publishers in under-represented nations  
• Support for transitioning from closed to open publishing 
• Content is indexed in OA abstracting and indexing (A&I) services such as DOAJ, DOAB 
• Evidence of a digital preservation strategy 

This open access investment strategy was prepared in Winter 2024 by: Elizabeth Yates, Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian; Alicia Zorzetto, Head, Collections Services and Laurie Morrison, Collections Librarian.

Documents consulted in preparing this strategy: 

CRKN. (n.d.) Assessment Guidelines for Open Access Publishers 

UBC Library. (n.d.) UBC Library Assessment Criteria for Open Access Publishers 

University of Guelph Library (n.d.). Open Investments Evaluation Criteria 

Western Libraries (n.d.). Criteria for Open Access memberships 

• arXiv – open-access archive scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics
• Bioline International – not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries
• Confederation of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI)
• Directory of Open Access Books – a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books
• Directory of Open Access Journals – community-driven index of scholarly, peer-reviewed open access journals
• DSpace repository software for the Brock Digital Repository
• Erudit Partnership for Open Access (Coalition Publi.ca) – Canadian initiative advancing digital scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences
• MIT Press Direct-to-Open (D20) – moves scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model, where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations – an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, open dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations
• Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) – operates three platforms:
  • OAPEN Library – a central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books
  • OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit – a toolkit on OA book publishing for authors
  • Directory of Open Access Books – a discovery service indexing OA books, in partnership with OpenEdition
• Open Citations – not-for-profit infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data
• Open Journal Systems hosted by Scholars Portal – software and infrastructure supporting Scholarly Journals at Brock
• ORCID Canada Consortium (ORCID-CA) – promotes use of international standards for researcher identifiers in Canada
• PhilPapers – largest open access archive in philosophy
• Public Knowledge Project (PKP) – builds and supports open access publishing platforms for journals, books and preprints
• ROR – community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations
• Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) Open Access Project – supports open access journal and book publishing
• Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) – cost-sharing framework supporting open access initiatives around the globe
• Open Book Collective Scholar Led Package – six academic-led, non-profit, born-OA book publishers, including African Minds, Mattering Press, mediastudies.press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, and punctum books
• Sherpa Romeo — provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies
• Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) – supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design
• University of Michigan Fund to Mission – project converting monographs to open access

The Library Open Access Publishing Fund operated from 2011 to spring 2023, providing direct grants to researchers to help offset the costs of article processing charges (APCs) levied by some open access journals.

By providing 141 grants to 123 researchers across 18 academic departments, the fund successfully fulfilled its educational mandate of raising awareness of the benefits of open access. 

Now, Brock is aligning with other Canadian research institutions by redirecting funds towards more equitable and sustainable forms of open access. This change reflects an evolving open access landscape which includes a growing number of collective approaches to open dissemination as well as newly available read-and-publish agreements with scholarly publishers which provide discounts or APC waivers for Brock authors. 

We encourage Brock authors to consider the broad spectrum of open access strategies available to them, including publishing: 

• In subscription journals and depositing copies of their articles in the Brock Digital Repository, a free service provided by the Library 
• In one of the 13,000 open access journals which do not charge APCs; to find one, consult the Directory of Open Access Journals 
• In a journal for which the Library has a read-and-publish agreement