University Supports for Open Access: A Canadian National Survey

Abstract: The advent of policies at research-funding organizations requiring grantees to make their funded research openly accessible alters the life cycle of scholarly research. This survey-based study explores the approaches that libraries and research administration offices at the major Canadian universities are employing to support the research-production cycle in an open access era and, in particular, to support researcher adherence to funder open-access requirements. Responses from 21 universities indicated that librarians feel a strong sense of mandate to carry out open access-related activities and provide research supports, while research administrators have a lower sense of mandate and awareness and instead focus largely on assisting researchers with securing grant funding. Canadian research universities already contain infrastructure that could be leveraged to support open access, but maximizing these opportunities requires that research administration offices and university libraries work together more synergistically than they have done traditionally.