Research

Open access refers to scholarly research and learning resources that are freely available without many or all of the usual copyright or licensing restrictions. The open movement encourages the unrestricted sharing of research and learning resources with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of learning, culture, science and society. We are here to help faculty, staff, and students both contribute to and benefit from all things open. If you have questions about Open Access, feel free to contact Cara Bradley or Christina Winter.

The University of Regina Library supports open access publishing by providing:

Author fees, also known as Article Processing Charges (APCs), are a fee charged to authors by some academic journals or publishers to cover the costs associated with the publication of an article. The library has negotiated discounts on APCs as part of our license fees.

As part of our ongoing commitment to the democratization of knowledge through Open Access, the University of Regina Librarians’ and Archivists’ Council (LAC) issued a new policy which came into effect March 1st, 2022.

Our original Open Access Resolution was published in 2011 and focused on publishing in Open Access journals, and making those publications available in oURspace. Since then, the Open landscape has expanded to include Open Research, Open Scholarship, Open Educational Resources, and Open Publishing; accordingly, our new policy is intended to reflect this growth and reaffirm our commitment to the principles of Open. 

We hope that our new policy will encourage the campus community to join our librarians and archivists in making their work available through publishing articles in Open Access journals, making research data available in Open Data Repositories, and depositing their publications in our Open Access institutional repository, oURspace.

Additional support for Open Access is provided through our financial support for these Open Access initiatives:

1. The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), through which the University of Regina Library provides financial support for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), SHERPA/RoMEO, a directory of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies and Redalyc/AmeliCA, an open access journal index and article hosting platform for scholarly Open Access journals published in 31 countries, including Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe.
2. Coalition Publi.ca, a strategic partnership created by Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project, which is dedicated to the advancement of research dissemination and digital publishing in the social sciences and humanities in Canada and abroad. As members of CRKN (the Canadian Research Knowledge Network), the University of Regina Library supports this work to create a framework for a new relationship between journals and libraries, and helps to provide financial support to Canadian journals during the transition to a fully open access model.  Starting in 2018, CRKN members have committed to a five year partnership that involves over 125 journals, 40 of which are currently open access.
3. SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing), the largest scale global open access initiative ever built, involving an international collaboration of over one thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. SCOAP³ enjoys the support of funding agencies and has been established in co-operation with leading publishers. Eleven publishers of high quality international journals are participating in SCOAP³. Elsevier, Institute of Physics, and Springer, together with their publishing partners, have been working with the network of SCOAP³ national contact points. Reductions in subscription fees for thousands of participating libraries worldwide have been arranged, making funds available for libraries to support SCOAP³. As CRKN members, the University of Regina Library fully participates in this international initiative, supporting the project through redirection of subscription fees.
4. Canadiana Open Access Heritage Collection Project, a 10-year initiative (begun in 2013) to digitize the most significant Canadian archival fonds previously available only in micro-formats, and to endow this corpus with carefully compiled, robust metadata. The collection was created with funding from CRKN (including the University of Regina Library) and the collaboration of Library and Archives Canada and is informed by an academic advisory group.
5. MIT Press Direct to Open Ebooks
   is a collective action model built to support open access publication of digital monographs from MIT Press. Through the support of libraries and consortia worldwide, digital monographs will become openly accessible each year without book processing charges (BPCs).