Look Up ‘Open Access Help’ in the University Library

---

Social Science Space reported last week how–according to one survey drawn from the STEM fields–Canadian researchers like the principle of open access scholarly publishing but shied away from it when publishers came seeking the author fees this model usually requires. The survey furter noted that a lot of researchers didn’t really know if their funders or institutions might have procedures in place to shoulder the cost of these ‘article processing charges, or APCs.

Some do, as Andrew Waller, open access librarian at the Centre for Scholarly Communication at the University of Calgary recently explained to SAGE’s Jim Gilden. Waller is a noted champion of open access; in 2011 he was named Open Access Advocate of the Year by the BioMed Central, an international open access publisher.

In a wide-ranging half-hour interview Waller answers a series of questions about Calgary’s innovative approach to OA, which includes an Open Access Authors Fund–the first ever established in Canada. (Want one at your institution? Author demand, says Waller, spurred Calgary’s decision.)

Other questions posed by Gilden, a senior field editor for SAGE, include:

What role does open access play at the University of Calgary libraries? How involved are the university librarians involved in vetting for quality OA journals for submission? How does this fund work with the university’s institutional repository? What is the relationship between the library’s OA efforts and their university press? How do the librarians support their university’s OA researchers? Is a university OA mandate in the works?

---