Preamble
McGill University Librarians and Archivists are committed to open access scholarship, the distribution of research outputs online and free of cost, as a way to increase the visibility, usage, and impact of publicly funded research. Open access to scholarship means more efficient dissemination of research compared with traditional publishing models, and contributes to the creation of a just and equal society by facilitating barrier-free access to scholarly content to the broadest possible community. We champion and practice open access scholarship at McGill University with the aim to benefit scholars, practitioners, policy makers, and the general public.
We encourage the use of this statement as a model for use and endorsement by other members of the McGill community. To encourage reuse, this statement is licensed Creative Commons Attribution, CC-BY 4.0, which permits users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, so long as users credit McGill Library as the author, provide a link to this license, and indicate if any changes were made.
The intention of this revised statement adopted April 24, 2023, is to encourage open access publishing of our scholarly outputs. It should be read and interpreted consistently with McGill policies related to academic freedom and intellectual property. It is to supersede the Open Access Statement for McGill Library endorsed by McGill Library Council on April 30, 2020.
Open Access Statement
To make our research outputs as widely available and accessible as possible, members of McGill Library Council will strive to disseminate their own work openly and advocate for open access scholarship by employing one or more of the following strategies:
- Deposit a version of the publication in an open access repository
- For example, McGill Library manages the eScholarship@McGill repository and provides open access and long-term archiving
- Retrospective deposit is encouraged
- Publish in an open access journal
- Openly disseminate any scholarly textual and non-textual outputs in a manner consistent with copyright agreements, legislation, publishing ethics, and any granting agency requirements
- Advocate for open scholarship in their work as editors, reviewers, and authors
- Encourage and support McGill researchers, including their Library colleagues, to make their research openly available
Scope
Scholarship includes, but is not limited to:
- Articles
- Books and book chapters
- Conference papers, posters, proceedings, and presentations
- Research data
- Other scholarship appropriate to the discipline (e.g. source code, working papers, policy documents, etc.)
This statement should be reviewed at least every five years by the McGill Library’s Standing Committee on Scholarly Communications. Any proposed amendments will be brought before Library Council for discussion and endorsement.
Acknowledgements + Thanks
We thank Brock University Library Council and Simon Fraser University Senate from whom we drew inspiration for this statement.
For further information and resources on Open Access, see McGill Library’s webpages on the topic: https://www.mcgill.ca/library/services/open-access
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.