Get Started: Access

Open Access is founded on the principle that research, which is supported in large part by government subsidy, should be made available to the public in order to ensure it has the largest possible impact. This makes your research available to everyone, without price and publisher paywall barriers. It means your research is available to everyone, including:

  • Other researchers and professionals
  • Health care and education workers
  • Policy makers
  • The general public
  • Global audiences

Open Access leads to research that is cited more quickly and more often. It accelerates the rate of scholarly exchange and promotes better reproducibility of research results.

Today many funding agencies including Canada’s Tri-Agencies require making publications and data openly accessible as a condition of receiving a grant.

UBC has its own position statement encouraging open access.


source: https://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:Open UBC/Access/Get Started/What

There are several ways to make your research open: publish in an Open Access journal or book platform; archive a peer-reviewed version of your work in cIRcle or other Open Access repository; or pay a publisher article processing charges to remove access restrictions. Here are some options you can explore:

Publishing in a Journal

  • Find an Open Access journal for your publication
  • Open Journal Systems (OJS) software is available to UBC faculty members who are editing or supporting Open Access electronic journals as well as recognized UBC student journals. Follow up with ojs.support@ubc.ca if you have questions about setting up a journal of your own.
  • UBC Library has institutional memberships and discounts with a variety of open access publishers and organizations, many which discounts on article submission costs for OA publishing.

Publishing in a Repository

  • cIRcle is UBC’s open access institutional repository for published and unpublished material created by the UBC community and its partners. Its aim is to showcase and preserve UBC’s unique intellectual output by making content freely available to anyone, anywhere via the web.
  • Publish your work in a subject specific Open Access Repository.

Publishing a Book

For additional tools and guides for Open Access, go the Open Access Toolkits.


source: https://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:Open_UBC/Access/Get_Started/How

Critical Education - An open access international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is hosted on a UBC-supported instance of Open Journal Systems.

From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East & East Asian Religions (Frogbear) - A multi-institution project that surveys key sites of religious practice and knowledge in East Asia. The Frogbear project is collecting textual, photographic, audiovisual, and related evidence to make it available to the public via cIRcle, UBC’s open access digital repository.

Digital Meijis: Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150 - In collaboration with UBC Library, The Meiji at 150 Project (hosted by the Centre for Japanese Research, Department of History, and Department of Asian Studies) created an open monograph of visual essays co-edited by Tristan R. Grunow and Naoko Kato.

ArtsOne Open- Arts One Open is an open, online extension to the University of British Columbia’s Arts One program that enables anyone to join this voyage of discovery and critical analysis.

For additional examples of Open Access, go to the Open Access examples gallery.


source: https://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:Open UBC/Access/Get Started/In Practice

Open Access CoP

The Open Access (OA) CoP is designed for participants to share knowledge, expertise, scholarship, ideas, and suggestions on the implementation of open access. Open access refers to an alternative academic publishing model in which research outputs (including peer-reviewed academic journal articles, theses, book chapters, and monographs) are made freely available to the general public for viewing, and often for reuse. This is unlike the traditional scholarly publishing model under which publishers require institutions or individuals to pay for access to these materials.

Collectively, the OA CoP is a place to discuss, share, and develop advocacy strategies for open access at UBC. We may invite expert scholars and practitioners to give workshops on emerging ideas and tools related to open access.

Learn More


source: https://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:Open UBC/Access/Get Started/OACoP