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.
UNB’s Open Access Policy met with unanimous support at both Senates’ November 2023 meetings. This policy reaffirms the library’s mandate to help UNB authors comply with funders’ open access requirements, make their research more widely discoverable and accessible, and collaborate with other researchers globally.
Support to Authors
The libraries offer a number of services to authors throughout the lifecycle of publishing:
- APC discounts or waivers via transformative agreement:
- You can also check compatible agreements on our Open Access APC Discounts Guide.
- You can check this list from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to see if your publisher supports an APC discount.
- Feel free to offload the task of checking your publication on us with our Publishing Support Form.
- 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:
Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian, Mike Nason
Related Resources
OA Publishing
The Centre for Digital Scholarship strongly supports open access journal publishing – as well as other open access projects within the Digital Humanities and beyond – and also oversees the operation of UNB's Institional Repository, UNB Scholar.