Reclaiming open access

It’s time to prioritize investments in open infrastructure to realize truly transformational open access.

November 13, 2024

This is not another opinion piece outlining the need for open access (OA). It is about the pitfalls the research community has stumbled into during our quest for OA, particularly our lack of investment in open infrastructure.

In Canada, we have all of the elements needed to foster equitable, sustainable and community-led OA publishing supported by state-of-the-art infrastructure. We are also well positioned to develop a national approach to Diamond OA, in which access to research is free for readers, who don’t have to pay subscriptions, as well as for authors, who are not required to pay Article Processing Charges (APC).


Read more: Open access: a diamond in the rough?


Canada is fortunate to have two internationally recognized open infrastructures for research dissemination: the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which develops free software for scholarly publishing used by tens of thousands of journals worldwide, and Érudit, which operates Canada’s largest research dissemination platform. Both are based at Canadian universities. Together, PKP and Érudit formed Coalition Publica to advance their shared mission to support OA in Canada. Coalition Publica brings together journals and libraries across Canada to advance an equitable OA model that supports the exceptional research being published here, in both official languages.

Part of the power of Coalition Publica is the development partnerships across provincial lines. Take for example the University of Alberta Library (UAL) which hosts a vibrant library publishing program that supports scholar-led OA journals. In collaboration with Érudit and PKP, the library is taking advantage of the infrastructure developed by Coalition Publica, expanding the reach of our OA journals and helping them access funds from the Partnership for Open Access, which provides financial support to non-commercial scholarly journals through the ongoing commitment of library partners. UAL benefits from open infrastructure to scale its library publishing activities, the journals benefit from increased readership and financial support, Canadian research libraries benefit by keeping these journals open access, and Canadian researchers benefit by having more APC-free OA venues to publish their research.

However, it remains a challenge to ensure that this community-owned infrastructure has the resources it requires to thrive in the current publishing environment, with much of Coalition Publica’s funding currently coming from time-limited and administratively burdensome government grants. This is despite the fact that the funds needed by Coalition Publica would be only a fraction of the amount libraries spend on commercially-published subscription content and transformative agreements, where costs shift from paying for reading access to pre-paying APCs for researchers to publish their articles OA.

Here we see another paradox: we risk the sustainability of the open infrastructure that we have built and maintain for our community, while at the same time we are compelled to spend more on commercial content every year. Investments in open infrastructure and OA shouldn’t come from the last pennies shaken out of the library’s piggy bank, they should be a top line item.

Making the shift from commercial investments to community investments is not going to be easier the longer we wait. Commercial publishers will likely never deliver on the promise of transformative agreements to change their journals to immediate OA, even though library budgets are now monopolized by these commercial OA models and there are serious concerns about their limitations. The APC-based approach to OA enshrined in transformative agreements inherently excludes researchers from institutions that have not signed transformative agreements or who do not have access to funds to pay APCs, which can sometimes be as much as $10,000 per article. Yet, we continue to accept transformative agreements as an OA model because their transactional structure is familiar and fits within established systems.

Our community has an obligation to invest in the most equitable and sustainable forms of OA. During recent consultations on a new OA policy for federally funded research, Canada’s Tri-agencies noted a high level of interest in Diamond OA. It’s clear that we cannot ignore these calls for ethical and scholar-led OA models.

Recognizing that libraries are only part of the solution to this complex conundrum, we call on stakeholders at every level to collaboratively develop a national investment strategy for OA and open infrastructure to reclaim research as a common good.

Now is the time as the future of OA is being written. What we do collectively over the next few years will set the path for the next era of open research. By embracing transformative agreements, we believed that we would be getting transformation. We now know that this transformation has to come from us. Canada has a unique opportunity to expand Diamond OA because we are already set up to collaboratively invest. When we built our national and provincial library consortia to increase access to digital content, we set the framework for working together to effect change. Our community has the tools and the capacity, now we must re-commit to the truly transformational investments that will foster the next wave of access to knowledge.

Dale Askey is vice-provost, library & museums and chief librarian at the University of Alberta. Tanja Niemann is executive director of Érudit and co-lead of Coalition Publica.

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