Our approach to investments in Open

The Â鶹Éç Libraries are committed to prioritizing various Open Access (OA) projects, initiatives, models, and approaches. We are also committed to assisting the Â鶹Éç community to meet funding mandates and contribute to OA publishing.

Â鶹Éç Libraries support organizations which promote open access through advocacy, open access content, and infrastructure for open access publishing. Examples of the kinds of initiatives we support include:

  • Organizations studying or promoting new OA business models (e.g., SPARC)
  • Publishers/content providers operating under OA business models (e.g., MIT Direct2Open)
  • Tools that enable or enhance OA content (e.g., PKP, DOAJ)

This document provides strategic directions and rationale as to how Â鶹Éç Libraries allocate collection development funds to open access initiatives.

Â鶹Éç Libraries are guided by the following considerations when investing in open access resources and initiatives:

  1. the fundamental definition of open access: free, unrestricted online access to research outputs
  2. the newest from the Budapest Open Access Initiative as well as the , particularly:
  • the need to host OA research on open, non-commercial, community-controlled infrastructure (e.g. Directory of Open Access Books, Open Journal Systems, Érudit)
  • the importance of OA models which:
    • benefit all regions of the world
    • support alternative models of OA such as no-fee OA journal publishing as well as self-archiving via repositories
    • are controlled by academic/community organizations
  1. evaluation criteria such as open access model, relevance to the Â鶹Éç community, sustainable economic model, Equity, Diversity, Indigeneity, Inclusion, Accessibility (EDIIA), technical infrastructure and implementation, quality etc.

Note: Â鶹Éç Libraries do not pay for individual Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Â鶹Éç researchers. We will consider, however, joining organizations devoted to open access publishing, for which membership provides Â鶹Éç researchers with discounts on or fully covers OA publishing charges. We also support Â鶹Éç researchers through the negotiation of and involvement in Transformative Agreements with publishers that offer discounts on APCs. For more information, see our list of APC Discounts.

Additional Â鶹Éç Investments in Open Access

Although outside the scope of collection development principles, Â鶹Éç Libraries support open access additionally through the open access repository as well the hosting of open access journals through its Scholarly Publishing Services. The Libraries have also released an Open Access Statement for Â鶹Éç Libraries.

The principles laid out in this document were endorsed by the Library Council of Â鶹Éç on October 28, 2024. Decisions regarding the application of these principles and the evaluating existing and potential open scholarship products, collections, or services for possible investments are undertaken by The Collection Development Committee (CDC). Users may contact collections.library [at] mcgill.ca (collections[dot]library[at]mcgill[dot]ca) directly with questions or requests.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Brock University Libraries and the University of Guelph for permitting the reuse of their open investment strategy documents:

  • Brock University Libraries : (adapted with permission)
  • University of Guelph Library: (adapted with permission)
  • University of Guelph Library, Open Investment Strategies Committee: . Licensed CC-BY 4.0

To encourage reuse, these principles are licensed , which permits users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, so long as users credit Â鶹Éç Libraries as the author, provide a link to this license, and indicate if any changes were made.