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Expanding the reach of University of Windsor research without financial, legal, or technical barriers is a top priority for the Leddy Library; however, researchers keen on publishing their research articles as open access often encounter steep publishing fees from commercial publishers.
The Leddy Library has entered new license agreements with the journal publishers Elsevier, Oxford University Press, and De Gruyter to cover or discount these fees for campus authors.
The license agreements, outlined on the library website, took effect Jan. 1. Articles accepted for publication after this date in most journals from these publishers will have the publishing fee fully covered. A smaller set of journals will have a partial discount on the publishing fee.
The Leddy Library worked collaboratively with partner university libraries to negotiate these new agreements through the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and the Ontario Council of University Libraries. By leveraging their collective purchasing power, the libraries have been able to achieve a cost-neutral switch for these agreements and maximize open access publishing benefits for authors.
Open access publishing enables authors to extend the reach of their research by reducing barriers to access and fosters a more equitable dissemination of knowledge. This was the case for Ken Drouillard, professor in the School of the Environment and the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, who recently published a research article open access and cost-free due to these agreements.
“This particular article describes work done in continental Africa where many researchers from the area do not have the same kind of access to library subscriptions that we do,” he says. “Thus, the open access option makes the work more accessible to people who can benefit from its observations the most.”
Authors also benefit from a citation advantage when publishing open access, with bibliometric research finding that open access articles receive on average 18 per cent more citations than articles that remain behind paywalls.
The library is committed to open access, working with publishers to simplify and make affordable open access publishing for authors. Leddy Library also supports other forms of open access publishing, including its free institutional repository of research papers.
Over the past three years these new forms of agreements resulted in savings of more than $450,000 in article publishing fees for UWindsor authors, benefiting researchers across many disciplines.
To learn more about open access, including these types of agreements, visit the library’s website or contact the library at scholarship@uwindsor.ca.