CRKN's Response to Tri-Agency Draft Open Access Policy | Canadian Research Knowledge Network

"The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on the recent revised Tri-Agency Draft Open Access Policy on Publications. The draft revised policy is a critical mechanism for establishing open access as the default for Canadian research publications and a step towards a sustainable open science ecosystem in Canada. In the short window allotted for gathering feedback, CRKN reached out to our broad membership across the academic library community to gather their input, which our Board of Directors has also reviewed. We are pleased to provide the following feedback that we hope the Tri-Agency will take under consideration. 

Diamond Open Access

With the requirement to deposit all funded articles in an institutional repository (IR) regardless of open access status, articles published in fully open access diamond journals (no subscription costs, no author payments) no longer satisfy the requirements of the policy. This appears to be at odds with the recent changes announced for the SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals program which are deliberately supportive of the diamond model. Canada has a strong diamond open access ecosystem, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. The proposed revisions to the policy would make the Canadian journals in the robust diamond ecosystem non-compliant with the Tri-Agency policy, despite their fully open access status and the lack of article publication charges payable by researchers. CRKN recommends that funded articles published by Canadian researchers in diamond open access journals should be considered compliant without requirement of deposit into IRs. 

Author Rights Retention and Pre-Prints

The Tri-Agency’s decision to support author rights retention is a significant improvement in the revised draft policy. In particular, the requirement placed on authors to declare their intention to retain rights over their work when submitting articles for publication provides CRKN with increased leverage during negotiations with for-profit commercial publishers. 

However, the exception in the policy that permits the deposit of pre-print or “un-refereed” articles undermines this leverage, as publishers will likely deny unembargoed deposits of “version of record” (VOR) or “author-accepted manuscript” (AAM) copies, leading to the proliferation of articles in IRs that have not been vetted by the established peer review process. This possibility puts at risk the quality and reliability of Canadian research and may further erode the public trust in science. CRKN recommends that minimum compliance must require deposit of the AAM, and that pre-print copies should not be considered to be compliant. Furthermore, we suggest that the Tri-Agency consider adopting a standardized naming convention for article versions, such as NISO-RP-8-2008: Journal Article Versions. 

With a stronger call for AAM or VOR as the version to be deposited, CRKN will have more leverage in negotiations with the largest journal publishers to assist their authors with compliance by developing workflows that can better support automatic deposit, rather than adding an extra burden on either researchers or the libraries at their institutions. ..."