Open access mandates are an increasingly common element of funder agreements. In 2015 the Tri-Agencies harmonized their open access policies, requiring funding recipients to make their published research openly available.
For this activity, consult the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications and, given the policy elements, consider how you would comply. When reviewing the policy, look for information on:
- What types of research outputs fall under the policy
- Whether or not there is financial support to pay article processing charges
- What embargo period is allowed
- Acceptable venues for open access publication
This policy is relevant for all funding awarded from The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Complete this Activity
Having reviewed the policy, write a brief insight outlining possible routes to policy compliance via both the green and gold approach. When composing your insight, consider the following:
- For a green open access approach, where would you deposit your work? Do the journals you publish in allow self-archiving within the time frame outlined in the policy?
- For a gold open access approach, what journals would you consider? What, if any, publishing cost would there be? How would you cover it?
Challenge Image Credit: Speedcurve Performance Analytics by Luke Chesser. Licensed under the Unsplash License.
For the green open access approach, I would use a SPARC agreement (if not in the publisher’s agreement) to negotiate being able to have a version of the article that I am permitted to post to my institutional repository, which I would be sure to do within 12 months of publishing the article.
As a graduate students, the gold open access approach is more difficult since I would need to cover any APC with fellowship money. This isn’t practical – an APC at a journal I was considering recently submitting to was equal to 15% of the fellowship. Therefore, I would select a journal with a different model for permitting my article to be published, open access. Luckily, in my discipline, this is possible, with one of our top journals being open access.
Similar to Elliot, I would opt for the Green Open Access Journal approach and select journals in my field that would allow me to deposit a pre-print version of my work in my institutional repository. This would provide the potential for additional feedback on my research than that to be provided by the peer reviewers. If for some reason the article processing fee was not too high and could be covered in part by the SSHRC grant, then I would consider publishing in a Gold Open Access Journal. In both cases, the scope of the journal would be most valuable in dictating where best to publish.
* For a green open access approach:
Although the Agencies encourage open access to all research publication, it is not a mandatory requirement for receipt of graduate scholarships and fellowships to adhere to related policies. Therefore, if I have a paper regarding a project that is sponsored by the SSHRC Graduate Scholarships, as a UBC graduate student, I will first consider to deposit it to cIRcle, which is the UBC digital repository. But if it also gets accepted by The Journal of Academic Librarianship, according to its Journal Publishing Agreement, I need to notify cIRcle that for a subscription article, it can only be shared for “Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and Scholarly Sharing purposes, with a DOI link to the version of record on ScienceDirect (and with the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license for author manuscript versions)”.
* For a gold open access approach:
I will consider the College & Research Libraries (C&RL), which is “the official, bi-monthly, online-only scholarly research journal of the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association” (C&RL Author Guidelines). According to its publication policies, it will not assess either APCs or article submission charges.
For a green open access approach, where would you deposit your work? Do the journals you publish in allow self-archiving within the time frame outlined in the policy?
For a gold open access approach, what journals would you consider? What, if any, publishing cost would there be? How would you cover it?
Tri-Agency Grant recipients are required to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible within 12 months of publication:
Options to ensure this access for include:
Deposition within an institutional repository and/or pubiication in a journal that will allow free access within 12 months
It is up to the researcher to determine which journal will allow retention of copyright and storing of the article.
If the publisher requires payment, this expense is covered by the agency,
I agree with the participants above, that if the researcher chooses a Green open access approach, then they should consider self-archiving by depositing their article in a repository like T/D space at their institution. If this option is not available, place the article in some other public access repository (with free storage)..One should choose a Green journal that allows the author to deposit any version of the article in an open access repository .I recommend the Green option, only if the journal allows the author, freedom to choose their own repository..
If the researcher chooses the Gold option, then the article may be made freely accessible immediately. However, there are different version of Gold journals (some have a delay on free access). Also it may be that the costs for Gold journal publications may cost too much for an author, or require additional work to secure publication funding. Some Gold journals are liberal with copyright licenses.
Apologies for the terrible punctuation errors. I thought I had edited these out before posting and now I cannot edit them at all.
In order to find the journal that is best for the author they will have to consult the publisher’s sites.
For instance, several publishers provide a list of gold journals – SAGE, Wiley, Elsevier and Springer, etc.
The database DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) has both Green and Gold journals in their journal collection.
One journal, I encounter on a regular basis, in syllabus work at my library, is “Nature Communication”; this journal is listed in DOAJ.
and uses Creative Commons Licenses for access. It is peer reviewed, multidisciplinary, and publicly accessible since Jan 2016.
The only drawback in choosing this journal is the publication fee, although Nature does have other open access journals that charge less.
Of course there is another option as well – Diamond – which is similar to Gold but does not require payment from authors.
One of my favourite journals is the OA journal, IRRODL, “The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education”. For myself, the requirement by the Tri Arrow Open Access Policy” to publish materials openly seems natural because of the recognition today that true knowledge creation can be achieved only by sharing of different perspectives. With this mindset, publishing in a OA journal with no waiting period (Gold OA path) would the only obvious choice.
I would not worry much about being published in the so called prestigious journals because my interest is with educational design research which is concerned about developing usable knowledge. If required, depositing the research in a depository, as the Green OA would satisfy the Tri Arrow policy, but not the idea of knowledge creation and getting feedback on the research.
In the IRRODL journal, I enjoy reading research from different cultures and communities, and that I feel is the true power of OA journals (Gold OA), that because of the OA, they attract research from a wide global perspective.
As a graduate student at UBC, I will deposit my work (if it’s sponsored by SSHRC) to cIRcle, UBC’s digital repository. I have deposited my undergraduate thesis there and I am required to do that for my Master’s thesis as well. If my work is published elsewhere, depending on the agreement with the publisher, I will strive to deposit a version of the article (whether it is preprint or the final version) to cIRcle.
Reading the responses above, I agree the gold open access approach is a lot more difficult as a graduate student. I don’t know is it practical to cover any APC with potential funding and whether it is worth the effort/money.
I need to ensure that my work is open access within 12 months. I am most likely to go for green open access approach because I can’t afford the cost for gold open access approach (Unless my fellowship can reasonably cover the cost for gold open access). I will choose a journal that allows me to deposit the pre-print version of my work to my institutional repository (I am a student of UBC so it will be Circle).
I am heartened to see the Tri-Agency policy so clearly state the value of open access within publicly funded research:
“The Agencies strongly support open access to research results which promotes the principle of knowledge sharing and mobilization – an essential objective of academia. As research and scholarship become increasingly multi-disciplinary and collaborative, both domestically and internationally, the Agencies are working to facilitate research partnerships by harmonizing domestic policies and aligning with the global movement to open access.”
To comply with this policy, I would need to follow the requirements in 3.1, Peer-reviewed Journal Publications:
– The green open access approach would, realistically, not be a good fit for my publications, as I work at a smaller post-secondary institution in Canada that does not currently have an institutional repository.
– A gold open access approach, to publish in a journal that offers open access within 12 months, would be the method I would need to pursue. Since my institution does not provide support for APCs (article processing charges), I would need to include that cost within the Tri-Council Agency grant expenses.
– I think I would begin my search for a gold open access journal by reviewing the list of publications within DOAJ.
Green OA being my choice, I’d evaluate if the embargo period would allow me to comply with the 12-month period, and I’d submit a version of my research to CiRcle. Having the means within the grant to cover the APC costs, and making use of the discounts UBC affiliates can have access to, I would consider the Gold OA as well. It’s a matter of cost/effort/time/results balancing.
This was an interesting read and something I didn’t know before seeing it earlier in this module. While I used to publish research under NSERC grants as a graduate student and postdoc, I have since switched to a different field where I don’t typically have funding from the tri-council agencies. In my current work, publishing using a green open access approach is not unusual – and using institutional or discipline-based archives is common. Personally, I like making my work available in places that are easy for people to access (popular websites that act as a small repository). Places like CiRcle are great too – as long as they allow the target audience to easily access the item. I have looked at a couple of the journals in my previous field and I was surprised to find a pretty wide range of open options available, with reduced fees for a 12 month embargo. The different options do have a variety of fees with a CC-BY costing $5000. Insane! I guess in terms of covering the cost, it could be looped into the initial grant application but I also wonder if I would okay spending $5000 for it. I look at that money and see income and learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate students to do research. I think I would have to carefully weigh my options so I meet the tri-council requirements, meet my own beliefs around open access, and also do things that align with my other values around this type of work and publishing.
This exercise almost gave me a panic attack. I am having article published by University of Chicago Press, and didn’t have the wherewithal to try to negotiate more open access with the publisher nor the option (or funds) to go “Gold”. However, some of my funding for this paper can be attributed to a SSHRC grant. Review the conditions of the agreement, I can feel scholars frustration navigating the system of pre-print and post-print. Everyone seems to us acronyms to obfuscate how one can openly publish there work. My final printed manuscript is very different from my submission due to the helpful notes from peer reviewers and I can now understand the hesitance to publicly post pre-prints. Luckily the embargo for my “AAM” or “VOR” as they call it is only 12 months!
Still hard to navigate and advise how to publish openly to faculty I work as each publisher is different, especially when trying to adhere to tri-agency funding.
Gold Access Approach:
I thought I would tackle the gold access approach first – probably one of the most relevant journals for me would be the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education https://www.springer.com/journal/42330 however I discovered there is an extremely high APC of $2890.00 (Not sure if this is Canadian or USD) to publish open access. For me as a graduate student, this would be a lot – I would possibly use my funding to cover it but it seems excessive for me at this stage in my career.
A free option might be to choose something like the Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/cjnse/index , which is open access and has no APC’s.
Green Approach:
Through Open DOAR I looked for different research archives, (mostly for a learning opportunity) but settled on the one I already know about at my institution: ERA (Education and Research Archive) at the University of Alberta. My Master’s thesis is already in this archive and from 2014 onward, all U of A Theses / Dissertations are deposited here. Given that I have yet to complete my dissertation (let alone consider publication), I would seek out a journal that would allow self-archiving. I looked up the policy on the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education (which I had considered for the gold route as well) and discovered that, as a “tranformative” journal, their embargo period was 12 months for individuals who published using the ‘traditional’ route. https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/policies/journal-policies
So, I guess this leads me to a question – since the requirement is “within 12 months” for the Tri-Agency Policy, does an embargo period of 12 months “meet” this requirement, or is it outside this requirement? (Technically, an embargo period of 12 months means that the paper isn’t available “within” twelve months, though it might be available in 12 months + 1 day).
(Or am I overthinking this?)
Thanks!
Carol