Open Access and the Public Purse | Academic Matters

"Last year, we were introduced to a 'Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy,' put forward by NSERC and SSHRC to harmonize their requirements with the CIHR. Under this policy, all peer-reviewed journal articles based on research funded by these councils must be made available through Open Access (OA), free and online. Researchers could either publish in a journal that is OA or has OA options, or deposit the article in an OA repository within twelve months of publication. There is much to applaud here, particularly for those of us who have long supported OA as a means of making our work more widely available to international research communities that cannot afford increasingly high journal subscription fees or Canadians who are not physically within reach of a university library. The view, however, gets a little different once we realize that this policy does not foster OA in general, just select research publications (grant-funded journal articles), and allows federally funded research grants to be used to pay the Article Processing Charges (APCs) sometimes required for OA publication. Because of this particular focus, one of the effects of the proposed policy would be to foster the transfer of considerable funds from federal research councils to the large multinational publishers who charge some very high APCs. Such implications are not addressed in the recently published overview of the feedback SSHRC and NSERC received on its proposal, 'Opening Canadian Research to the World: Summary of Responses to Draft Tri‐Agency Open Access Policy Consultation' and arguably run counter to support for the “Draft” as a matter of taxpayer fairness (see, for example, Michael Geist’s column on this topic) ..."