Simon Fraser University
AC-11: Open Access to Research

In September 2015, an Open Access Advisory Committee was struck to write and recommend a university-wide Open Access policy as well as to review policies relating to SFU Central Open Access Fund. In February 2016, Senate Library Committee reviewed the draft policy and gave its support for the Committee to go forward with broader campus consultations. Members of the Committee hosted a series of town hall meetings at each SFU Campus location to introduce the draft policy, answer questions, and hear discussion and feedback. The draft policy was revised based on the community consultation feedback and the final policy draft was sent to Senate and approved in January 2017. In January 2017, SFU Senate endorsed the Open Access Policy (OAP) acknowledging the commitment of SFU faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows to share the products of their SFU research with the broadest possible audience. To satisfy the policy requirement in one easy step, SFU researchers can provide an electronic copy of the finalized text of their published articles to the Simon Fraser University Library. The Library will make the articles available to the public, taking into consideration requirements for access delay. SFU's Open Access Author Fund supports SFU authors who wish to publish in Open Access (OA) journals and who are required to pay an article processing fee (APC). Funds are available to help cover Article Processing Charges for publication in OA journals: support of up to $2500 (CDN) per article for up to two articles per calendar year.

Summit (http://summit.sfu.ca) is the Simon Fraser University research repository, a place to bring together selected scholarship and research of SFU and to promote this work to the wider world via Open Access. To encourage and support researchers in publishing their research data, an increasingly common requirement of funders and a further step in the move toward open access of research output in all formats, SFU Library developed RADAR, a research data repository, along with detailed guides, tools, and workshops to support the development of data management plans. https://www.lib.sfu.ca/help/publish/scholarly-publishing/open-access/open-access-policy

SFU Library’s Community Scholars Program The SFU Library has negotiated with several major journal publishers to permit off-campus access to their journals by staff from a select group of the province’s charitable and nonprofit organizations – places that are doing critical work on social issues including poverty alleviation, homelessness, education, and health care, but that often lack access to the most recent research on such topics. The pilot phase of this program ran in 2016 and provided 100 individuals with access to the journals of two major publishers. The current phase has expanded to 500 individuals and six publishers. In addition, participants in this program have access to a dedicated research librarian and a specialized search interface developed to focus on the resources available to them.

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