Université Laval
AC-11: Open Access to Research

CorpusUL, Université Laval's institutional repository, aims to make scientific production freely accessible in order to increase its visibility and promote the sharing of knowledge in a sustainable manner.

The institution does not directly allocate a budget to pay Article Processing Charges, BUT does so indirectly through agreements the ULaval Library makes with publishers who support 100% APCs (as for example : SAGE, Cambridge University Press , IOP and PLOS)

Instead of establishing support for open access solely focused on the “gold open access” model, ULaval has chosen to diversify it and support various models. Gold open access is supported through agreements negotiated with the CRKN consortium. The "green open access" is supported by resources allocated to the institutional repository. Finally, the “diamond open access” is supported by financial participation in various open access publishing initiatives (scientific journals and university presses).

Note: French-language scholarly journals in Canada have not adopted the “gold open access” model with APC. From this point of view, it is logical that ULaval did not rely solely on this model.

Gold open access (with APC)
We have agreements with the following publishers to cover APCs for ULaval researchers in some of their journals:
- Sage (free for 864 reviews)
- Wiley (free for 1332 journals)
- Cambridge University Press (100% free for journals)
- Canadian Science Publishing (5 journals)
Other agreements make it possible to obtain substantial discounts with the following publishers:
- ACS Publications
- Biomed Central
- Canadian Science Publishing
- Elsevier
- MDPI
- Wise
- Taylor and Francis
A large portion of the library's acquisition budget is allocated to these agreements.

Green open access (self-archiving)
- UL makes the CorpusUL institutional repository available to researchers.
- A team of three librarians, a copyright specialist, 5 documentation technicians and one IT developer take care of the proper functioning of this service.
- Added to this are the hosting costs on the servers.

Diamond open access (without APC)
The ULaval Library supports the following publishers for the publication of articles and books in open access:
- MIT Press Direct to Open Ebooks
- SCOAP3
- Iwa Publishing
- Les presses de l’Université Laval

In addition to supporting these open access models, ULaval Library helps fund infrastructure related to open access publishing, including the following platforms:
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Érudit (Platform based in Quebec which aims to distribute open access scholarly journals, many of which are French-speaking)
- OpenEdition (Platform based in France which aims to distribute open access scholarly journals, many of which are French-speaking)
- Public Knowledge project, in particular for the Open journal system platform which allows journals published by researchers to be hosted at UL and distributed in open access.
- Lyrasis (organization that develops the DSpace software which is the one used for the CorpusUL institutional repository)

In addition to the agreements with the publishers cited above, the UL Library devotes approximately $600,000 of its budget to supporting open access each year.

This service offers the managers of a scholarly journal at Université Laval a platform, Open Journal System (OJS), which allows them to manage the evaluation and publishing process of the journal, from the reception of manuscripts to the production of distribution files.

https://www5.bibl.ulaval.ca/services/soutien-a-ledition-savante-et-a-la-recherche/soutien-aux-revues-savantes-de-lul