November 22, 2013 – Sylvia Hunter, SSP Communications Committee, University of Toronto Press – Canada’s three major public research funding bodies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)—posted the draft of the new Tri-Agency Open Access Policy for public comment on the NSERC website on October 15, 2013.
The draft Tri-Agency policy, which is based on the existing CIHR Open Access Policy, would mandate that publications based on research funded by any of the three agencies be made freely available within 12 months of publication, either through publication in a journal that offers immediate or delayed OA (with an embargo of 12 months or less) or by depositing the full text of the final peer-reviewed manuscript in a freely accessible digital archive, such as an institutional or discipline-specific repository. The policy specifies that funding recipients would be responsible for determining the policies of journals to which they submit their manuscripts and ensuring that their publications comply with the policy, and that the funding (including specific grant number) must be acknowledged in the publication.
For research funded by CIHR, the policy already applies to any funding awarded since January 1, 2008; the CIHR also encourages holders of pre-2008 grants to comply with the policy. Subject to the results of the public consultation process, the proposed implementation date for NSERC- and SSHRC-funded research is September 1, 2014.
The draft policy document specifies that “the Agencies consider the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds,” but does not address the implications of the proposed OA policy for the 2014 grant round of SSHRC’s existing triennial Aid to Scholarly Journals program, currently a major source of operating and project funds for peer-reviewed Canadian journals in the humanities and social sciences.
The agencies are asking representatives of institutions and organizations to consult their researchers and members and “report on the collective perspective,” but independent responses from individuals are also invited. Responses should be sent electronically to openaccess@nserc-crsng.gc.ca and may be submitted until December 13, according to the Simon Fraser University (SFU) blog Scholarly Publishing News.
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