Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication is an umbrella term that encompasses all of the ways that researchers and/or scholars communicate knowledge about a particular subject. The whole system of scholarly communications, from the way research is funded, results are produced, data is organized, and results are distributed continues to change. There are many issues for libraries and librarians, faculty, researchers, students, and institutions to consider. These include: open access, copyright, preprints, article processing charges, costs of published research, by funding agency requirements, and repositories of articles and data.

At the Library, there are several avenues for supporting scholarly communication at Laurier. These include:

• outreach and consultation for faculty and students
• maintaining an Institutional Repository, Scholars Commons @ Laurier
• providing APC discounts
• investigating and supporting open access, including support for OA infrastructure

The Library also has a program to support Research Data Management.

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are one way that research is made available openly.

Through the Library's work with publishers, individually and through our consortia, the following discounts are available to Faculty and Staff.

Note that the Library does not have funds to assist with APC costs. Most are negotiated by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and more details on the specifics can be found on their website.

The APC discount or coverage is applied based on the corresponding author. You must use a Laurier email and be the corresponding author to be eligible.

• American Chemical Society (ACS) journals : As a result of the Library subscription to the All publications package there is a $250 USD discount on the ACS Author Choice Open Access Service. The discount will be automatically applied.
• Cambridge University Press (CUP) journals : There is now a transformative agreement through our membership in CRKN. No charge for OA publishing in CUP hybrid and gold journals. The discount will be applied automatically with institutional email. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website. 
• Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) journals : There is free open access publishing for 5 journals and a 25% discount for the remaining 14 journals. of the APC for hybrid journals. Author must indicate affiliation when submitting. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website.
• Company of Biologists journals : APCs are now covered for these journals. 
• Elsevier journals (via ScienceDirect) : There is full coverage for APCs on most hybrid and a smaller discount on gold journals. Authors should indicated their institutional affiliation when submitting. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website.
• Institute of Physics (IOP) journals : The APC fees are covered for most hybrid and gold journals. Author affiliation will automatically apply discount. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website.
  • NOTE: This agreement ends DECEMBER 31. Articles accepted after this date will not be eligible for the discount. If you have any question, please contact Matt Thomas.
• Oxford University Press (OUP) journals : APC fees are covered for publishing in OUP's ~350 hybrid journals, and a 10% discount for OUP's gold open access journals. For instructions and list of journals see CRKN's page for Open Access Publishing.
• Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals : The APC fees are covered for all of PLOS. Author affiliation will automatically apply discount.
  • NOTE: This agreement ends DECEMBER 31. Articles accepted after this date will not be eligible for the discount. If you have any question, please contact Matt Thomas.
• Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals : There is a 15% discount on all hybrid journals. Authors should indicated institutional affiliation upon submission.
• Sage journals : There will be no APC charges for eligible hybrid journals. Authors will receive a 40% discount for most gold open access journals (exclusions apply). Author affiliation will automatically apply discount. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website.
• Taylor and Francis (T&F) journals : There is a 25% discount in T&F Open Select hybrid journals. Author affiliation will automatically apply discount. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website.
• Wiley journals : The APCs are covered for all Wiley hybrid journals. There is a list of eligible journals on the CRKN website.

Other Discounts

• Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library provides a discount in our pricing based on APCs paid. This is important because there are providing some accounting of journal pricing and APCs.

It is important to understand your rights and to read what you are signing.

Author Agreements

There will be some sort of agreement for you to sign or click through. You should understand what you are agreeing to. This is important to retain for your records.

You can ask for changes to your author agreements, your success in negotiating those changes will be dependent on the publisher. One resource is SPARC Canadian Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles.

Copyright

There are two parts to this.  The first relates to the creation of your work, if you are reproducing something (table, photo, etc.) that is not yours.  You will want to know what is allowable.  The second issue is who owns your copyright once it is published.  Pay attention to what the author agreement says around copyright and reuse. 

OA publishers will often use a creative commons license.

Versions

You will produce many versions of your work during the process. There are two versions that you will want to keep track of, especially depending on what your author agreement says you can do them

• Final publisher version - this is the final version, as it is printed by the publisher
• Post-print - is the final version before it is formatted by the publisher for the publication.

Publisher Policies

If you are looking for where to publish and what to know what the policies of the publisher are, you can search on the publisher website or for journals you can look in Sherpa Romeo. You can also look under the APC heading above for publishers that provide APC discounts.

Questions

Please contact Charlotte Innerd

Open Access (OA) is a movement which encourages scholarly information to be made available to the widest possible readership.  Many funders, including TriCouncil, require some level of open access as a condition of their funding.

There are many types of OA.  OA should be the following:

• Free to the user
• Available immediately (i.e. No publisher restrictions)
• Permanent location or URL
• Online format

Types of open access

There are many different types of open access, here are a few of the key ones

• Green allows for articles to be OA, usually not the final published version, usually hosted in an institutional repository, such as Laurier’s Scholars Commons. It is often at no cost, but there may be an embargo period. 
• Gold is OA for the final published version with hosting in a repository allowed, often a fee is charged.
• Diamond/Platinum publishing refers to those open access journals that contain peer-reviewed research which publishers make immediately and completely available at no cost.
• Gratis is the term for items that have some permission barriers, often related to copyright or licensing.
• Libre OA is the term for items that have removed most or all of the permission barriers.

Other Library support for OA Initiatives

• BioLine - is a pioneer in the provision of open access to peer reviewed bioscience journals published in developing countries.
• Coalition Publi.ca - a strategic partnership created by Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project. It is dedicated to the advancement of research dissemination and digital publishing in the social sciences and humanities.
• DOAJ - is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
• DOAB - is an online directory to increase discoverability of open access books.
• Erudit - is full-text, peer reviewed Canadian journal articles, chiefly in French. Erudit is an inter-university consortium promoting the dissemination of scholarly research. While not fully OA, we are supporting their efforts towards greater OA and in developing a new model of publishing
• HathiTrust - is a non-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving digitized books.
• Knowledge Unlatched - creates and/or disseminates open access scholarly books and journals by working with publishers.
• Open Library of the Humanities - is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). Funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined in the mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.
• ORCID - provides a persistent unique digital identifier for researchers to support research workflows, linkages between you and your work. ORCID-CA is the Canadian consortium of institutions in Canada that have memberships with ORCID to financially support the work of ORCID and leverage community support services.
• SCOAP3 - is working with leading publishers and has converted key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors. SCOAP3 is centrally paying publishers for the costs involved in providing Open Access, publishers in turn reduce subscription fees to all their customers, who can contribute to SCOAP3.
• Sherpa/Romeo - is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies.

Scholars Commons @ Laurier is Laurier's Institutional Repository, more information can be found on the site and on the Scholars Commons library webpage.

ORCID provides researchers with a unique identifier for researchers to identify their work.  This is managed by open, global, not-for-profit organization.  Create your ORCID on their site. For more information, view this tutorial or contact Charlotte.