Canadian Association of Research Libraries

• To meet this requirement, the Canadian government should empower academic authors through the adoption of secondary publishing rights.
• Tweaking the Copyright Act to include such rights would give academic authors the ability to make taxpayer-funded journal articles available to the public through open access upon publication.

Open access policy review

• In the past, most research papers would only be accessible to individuals who pay to access research papers or who work or study at universities willing to pay for access.
• However, authors are increasingly required to pay publishers in order to be published open access.
• In the European Union and the United States, governments have committed to immediate open access for publicly funded research.

Article processing charges

• For example, the Tri-Agency suffers from low rates of compliance with their open access policy when compared to other jurisdictions.
• It might be that they misunderstand their obligations or that they simply cannot afford the high article processing charges (APCs) that they might need to pay to publish in their journal of choice.
• Estimates indicate Canadian academic authors spent at least US$27.6 million on processing charges from 2015 to 2018, despite the preponderance of free-to-publish open access journals.

Secondary publishing rights

• While academic journal publishing is extremely profitable for publishing companies, the authors, editors and reviewers that form the backbone of the system are rarely compensated for their labour and face challenges negotiating fair publication agreements.
• The Canadian Federation of Library Associations has recently proposed one partial solution: to provide secondary publishing rights to academic authors in Canada.
• Secondary publishing rights have already been implemented in multiple European countries, with perhaps the most notable example being the Taverne Amendment in the Netherlands, which has seen the rate of open access top 80 per cent.