University of Calgary
AC-11: Open Access to Research

There are a number of ways the University of Calgary facilitates open access. The University of Calgary Press (launched in 2010) is one of only a handful of university presses in Canada to make its titles available online for download at no charge. The University of Calgary also has one of the world’s leading open access authors funds, which gives campus authors the choice of publishing their work in open access journals without personal cost. The fund, launched in 2008, was the first in Canada and the sixth in the world. It has broadened the reach and impact of the work of campus authors. The University of Calgary has created PRISM, is a repository of the university's intellectual output. Established and maintained by Libraries and Cultural Resources to manage, preserve and make available the academic works of faculty, students and research groups. The collection includes faculty publications, masters and doctoral theses, and research output from across Southern Alberta. PRISM is updated regularly, with new works added daily. The University of Calgary, also seeks to make all graduate student thesis available through its Vault. The Vault is a repository and digital archive of University of Calgary theses submitted after June 28, 2012. In addition to PRISM, Faculty are supported through the University of Calgary's Open Access Author Fund. The fund covers the cost of publishing for eligible campus authors who choose open access journals. This fund, originally $350,000 in total, has been doubled to $700,000. The fund has made over 600 articles available through open access since 2008, and was one of the first in the world to be established. The University of Calgary's library provides Journal Hosting and Conference Publication Services support for faculty and student publishing. They provide online platforms for publishing processes, assistance in getting started, a secure web site, and long-term preservation for creative and scholarly publications. The library currently hosts 23 journals, 15 of which are open access. Because of their commitment to support open access initiatives, they library also currently waives hosting fees for open access publications. The University of Calgary is proud to be a gold sponsor of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), a multi-university initiative developing (free) open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. The University of Calgary uses Open Journal Systems, a PKP software, for our Journal Hosting Program. The hosting service provided by Libraries and Cultural Resources (LCR) at the University of Calgary grew out of a CFI-funded project called Synergies. Synergies was a 5-year project that created a country-wide network to support the digital publication and dissemination of Canadian scholarly journals. When the project ended in 2013, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary committed to continuing that support with its hosting services. The University of Calgary Press embraces open-access publishing and makes as many of our publications as possible available open access i.e. free to anyone who wishes to download them. The University of Calgary Press seeks to ensure that the research of our authors is accessible to its widest possible audience. With our authors' permission, titles are published under a Creative Commons license and will be available for free download in PDF format from individual book pages on our website. Our open-access titles are also published in traditional book format and are available for purchase through bookstores and on-line retailers. This approach to making research open access is in addition to repository services such as PRISM and the VAULT. PRISM is the digital archive established and maintained by Libraries and Cultural Resources to manage, preserve and make openly accessible the academic works of faculty, students and research groups. PRISM gives University of Calgary researchers a green road to open access, allowing a self-archive mechanism for their research output. The collection includes faculty publications, masters and doctoral theses, and research output from across Southern Alberta. The VAULT is a digital archive of University of Calgary electronic, open access theses submitted after June 28, 2012. Finally, in addition to the university's own policy and incentives for open access, the Tri-Agency open access policy took effect in May 2015. New rules require researchers who receive public funding to make the results of their work freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. This applies to researchers who receive funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

The Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary has adopted a mandate to deposit their scholarly output in PRISM: University of Calgary Digital Repository. The repository has been in place since March 2003 and currently provides access to a broad range of scholarly output, including a growing collection of full text university theses. The text of the mandate is: "As an active member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary endorses the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration. LCR academic staff members believe that the output of our scholarly activities should be as widely disseminated and openly available as possible. Our scholarly output includes but is not limited to journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations if substantial, conference papers and proceedings, and datasets. Effective April 17, 2009, LCR academic staff commit to: 1) Deposit their scholarly output in PRISM: University of Calgary Digital Repository 2) Promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available 3) Where possible, publish their research in an open-access journal

https://www.ucalgary.ca/utoday/issue/2014-10-20/advocating-free-textbooks-and-open-access-journals