Our Commitment to Open Access

  2. Scholarship & Publishing
  3. Open Access Publishing
  4. Our Commitment to Open Access
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Open access is a core value of the University of Guelph Library and one of our Strategic Initiatives. We invest in these open access initiatives:

  • We allocate a portion of our acquisitions budget to support open content, infrastructure and software that support open scholarship, and advocacy organizations which increase the access to scholarship.
  • We have developed an Institutional Research Data Management Strategy, in partnership with the Office of Research, to ensure research data is made publicly available whenever possible.
  • We endorse MIT’s Framework for Publisher Contracts to support the transformation of the scholarly publication system so it is economically sustainable and ensures the widest possible readership for publicly funded research.

Our open investment strategy

McLaughlin Library’s Open Investment Strategy Committee (OISC) is tasked with mobilizing open scholarship through strategic investments in open access investments. OISC is responsible for: 

  • managing the growing open access budget  
  • driving the open investment strategy at the University of Guelph 
  • working with the library’s partners to further open scholarship values and priorities for investment consideration 
  • evaluating existing and potential open scholarship products, collections, or services for possible investment 

We believe in being transparent about how we decide to allocate the library’s open access budget. See Open Investment Evaluation Criteria for more information on how we evaluate investments. 

Our open investments

We support these organizations which promote open access through advocacy, open access content, and infrastructure for open access publishing: 

Our position on ResearchGate & Academia.edu

ResearchGate and Academic.edu are privately held companies with no mandate to preserve your research, nor to ensure it is available to others moving forward. These sites require a user to create an account--something many researchers are not comfortable doing. They also contravene intellectual property law.  

We recommend you do not load your own research onto these sites. To create a true record of your scholarship, and know that the content you have made available will remain that way in the future, reach out to the library to discuss your options, including making your work available in our institutional repository.

The library is committed to ensuring that members of our user community with disabilities have equal access to our services and resources and that their dignity and independence is always respected. If you encounter a barrier and/or need an alternate format, please fill out our Library Print and Multimedia Alternate-Format Request Form. Contact us if you’d like to provide feedback: lib.a11y@uoguelph.ca
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