Supporting Open Access

The Open Access (OA) movement is based on the principle that the products of academic research should be freely accessible to everyone. And, behind this principle is the idea that the spirit of scholarly study is spreading knowledge in order to improve society for everyone. In reality, academic journals can be very expensive and huge portions of scholarship are inaccessible to the public. While it's fairly common for folks to apply this to peer-reviewed journal articles, OA can apply to documents like theses, conference proceedings, presentations, learning objects, research data and many others. Although we speak of open access literature, open access is not in fact limited to scholarly texts but can encompass every kind of digital content, from data to video to software.

Read More About OA:

• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Peter Suber's Overview of Open Access
• Open Access Explained - Piled Higher and Deeper

Support to Authors

The libraries offer a number of services to authors throughout the lifecycle of publishing:

• Negotiation/Membership in consortia that lower the costs of author processing charges (APCs). 
  • You can check this list from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to see if your publisher supports an APC discount.
• Management and deposit of scholarly works into the UNB Scholar institutional repository, thereby enabling open access where eligible.
• Assistance meeting the Tri-Agency Policy Open Access Policy on Publications requirements.
• Assistance navigating publisher policies and OA mandates.
• Assistance evaluating journals and identifying "bad faith" publishers.
• Copyright consultation.
• Research Data Management assistance.
• Digital Publishing Services at the Centre for Digital Scholarship.

Librarians on both campuses will support faculty in depositing their scholarly works into UNB Scholar, and otherwise making the results of their research and scholarship open access.

Support to Instructors

There are a number of initiatives aimed at lowering costs to students and instructors alike. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer tremendous opportunities to lower costs associated with course materials while also opening those same materials up to the commons.

• UNB Libraries OER Guide
• UNB Libraries Course Reserves service can help instructors provide access to materials already-paid-for in the libraries' collections. Shifting course materials to already-available content can save students just as much money as OER can.

Contacts:
Scholarly Communications Librarian, Mike Nason