Coalition Publica’s Position and Recommendations Regarding the Draft, Revised Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications
La version française est disponible ici.
General Comments
As Canada’s federally-funded infrastructure for digital research dissemination and scholarly journal publishing in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), Coalition Publica is supportive of the move to immediate open access (OA) without cost to authors for research outputs stemming from federal funding. An integral part of Coalition Publica’s mandate is to support the transition to sustainable OA. We deeply believe that research is a public good and that Canadians should have access to publicly-funded research results, at the time of publication. This not only informs our own citizenry, but also deepens research impact and the recognition of Canadian research internationally.
We appreciate the time and effort the Tri-Agency has invested in revising its OA Policy and we offer the following reflections in continuum with the consultations that the Tri-Agency has facilitated to date, to which Coalition Publica has been pleased to contribute.
Maintaining Canadian Research Sovereignty & Independent Publishing Ecosystem
The draft policy outlines a requirement for all federally-funded researchers to deposit a copy of their articles in a Canadian institutional repository, otherwise known as Green OA. However, that this would be the sole mechanism for policy compliance neglects other essential components of Canada’s thriving research dissemination landscape and risks Canadian research sovereignty. At a time where research is under threat, it is critical that the policy contributes to maintaining a robust and independent Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem, which provides Canadian researchers with high quality venues in which to publish research on topics of regional, national and international importance.
Already, the vast majority of Canadian journals operate independently of commercial publishers and have already embraced Diamond OA, that is OA without author-facing fees (van Bellen & Céspedes, 2024). They are also more likely to publish research about Canada and its regions than commercial scholarly publishers (van Bellen & Larivière, 2024). Canadian journals are, therefore, an invaluable resource for making knowledge about our society and its most pressing issues available to not only our own citizens but also the whole world.
Despite their importance and quality, Canadian journals are often perceived as less prestigious than international journals published by large, commercial publishers. These for-profit publishers will easily gain a new advantage over independent Canadian journals under the proposed policy: automatic deposit in institutional repositories. Federally-funded researchers, who will see the proposed policy as an addition to their workload, will be attracted to publishers who can complete the deposit process on their behalf. The technically complex systems that some for-profit publishers have put in place to interface with institutional repositories are currently out of reach for independent Canadian journals and the infrastructure providers who support them. This inequity will compound researcher perceptions that commercial journals are the best place to publish their publicly-funded research, to the detriment of Canada’s open, independent, and high-quality publications. Should this come to pass, we would risk an essential aspect of Canadian research sovereignty: the need to maintain a thriving, domestic publishing ecosystem that supports the wide dissemination of research about our nation.
Alignment with Investments in Federally-Funded Research Infrastructure & Open Science
Since 2017, Coalition Publica has developed a robust digital research infrastructure to enable the open dissemination of Canadian research and support Canada’s independent scholarly publishing sector. Federal funding for Coalition Publica has been provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, through its Major Science Initiatives fund, and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, through the Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative. These public investments of roughly $2,000,000 annually have directly contributed to the growth of OA, by providing Canadian journals with an alternative to foreign-controlled commercial publishers. This strength in OA publication, underpinned by federally-funded infrastructure, positions Canada as a potential leader in open science.
Open science, as defined by UNESCO, is a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefit of scientists and society as a whole. Two essential components of open science are open scientific knowledge, including OA publications, and open science infrastructures, such as Coalition Publica.
Under the OA Policy released in 2015, all scholarly journals supported by Coalition Publica allowed federally-funded researchers to comply with the policy, as they are all disseminated in immediate OA or with a 12-month embargo on the Érudit platform (erudit.org). As such, it was possible for researchers to comply with the policy via the Coalition Publica infrastructure. Under the draft policy, it would not be possible for researchers to comply via our federally funded infrastructure: they would still be required to deposit their article in an institutional repository. The draft policy would undermine the public investments made in Coalition Publica by making it a less competitive venue for publishing Tri-Agency funded research and a less compelling alternative to commercial publishers for Canadian journals. This draft policy would diminish two essential Canadian contributions to open science: its high-quality, independent OA journals, and the federally-funded infrastructure that supports them, Coalition Publica.
Recommended Modifications
With the above points in mind, Coalition Publica makes the following recommendations to improve upon the draft policy:
Compliance via Diamond OA: the draft policy requires institutional deposit/Green OA as the sole compliance mechanism for funded researchers. We recommend that other forms of OA be accepted as compliance mechanisms, specifically publication in recognized Diamond OA journals (such as those indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, or DOAJ), or on trusted Diamond OA infrastructures, such as Coalition Publica. A potential impact of including other modes of OA in the policy would be a greater decentralization of access to funded research outputs, which may hamper efforts to monitor compliance. However, the Tri-Agency would still be able to monitor compliance by establishing their own enforcement procedures (which are notably absent from the draft policy) and adding requirements in the policy for recognized international standards that promote persistent identification and interoperability, such as ORCID and specific Creative Commons licenses.
Strong expression of support for Diamond OA: a clear intention of the draft policy was to enable immediate OA to federally-funded research without increasing the publishing costs for Canadian researchers, funders, or libraries, but the draft policy fails to mention Diamond OA, a robust alternative to pay-to-publish OA models that provides no-fee access to the peer-reviewed version of record. This absence is perplexing, given that Diamond OA was the preferred model of OA for all categories of respondents to the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications: Policy Review Survey. While we understand that Diamond OA publications do not exist in all disciplines, and that researchers have a right to exercise their academic freedom to publish in their preferred outlets, and so Green OA has a place in the policy, however the availability of peer reviewed versions must be prioritized in an age of disinformation. A strong signal within the policy that the Tri-Agency supports Diamond OA would have an important influence on raising the profile of Canadian Diamond OA journals and infrastructures. Coalition Publica responded positively when the Tri-Agency first announced the policy revision, and we continue to advocate for a national strategy on Diamond OA, which would greatly assist with the ongoing transition of Canada’s research ecosystem towards open science. Coalition Publica would be pleased to contribute to this national strategy, which should seek to expand Canadian Diamond OA capacity, including in the natural and health sciences.
Tanja Niemann
Co-lead, Coalition Publica
Executive Director, Consortium Érudit
Kevin Stranack
Co-lead, Coalition Publica
Operations Director, Public Knowledge Project
About Coalition Publica
Coalition Publica is a partnership created by Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) dedicated to the advancement of research dissemination and digital publishing in the humanities and social sciences in Canada, specifically designed to support the HSS community in the transition towards sustainable open access. Coalition Publica is pursuing this goal through the development of a non-commercial, open source national infrastructure dedicated to digital scholarly publishing, dissemination, and research—combining PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) software and Érudit’s digital dissemination platform (erudit.org).
