Open access

Open access (OA) is the practice of making your research available online free of charge. It is a growing movement designed to make research more widely available and increase its impact.

Benefits of open access publishing

Publishing your research openly can increase its reach and impact while helping make scholarly knowledge available to a broader community. Benefits of open access publishing include:

• Increased visibility and impact. Openly available research can be discovered and accessed by more readers, including researchers at institutions without subscriptions, practitioners, policymakers, educators, and members of the public. Greater accessibility can lead to increased use, citation, and application of your work.
• Greater control over your work. Depending on the publishing agreement and the route you choose to open access, you may be able to retain some or all of your copyright and grant others permission to reuse your work under a Creative Commons licence.
• Compliance with funder requirements. Making your publications openly accessible can help you meet the open access requirements of research funders, including the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) and the Canadian Tri-Agency.
• Contribution to the public good. Open access helps remove financial and other barriers to scholarly research, making research findings available to the broader research community and the public. As the Tri-Agency's open access policy notes, “societal advancement is made possible through widespread and barrier-free access to cutting-edge research. Open access enables researchers to make their publications freely available to the domestic and international research community and to the public at large, thereby enhancing the use, application and impact of research results.”