BioMed Central Blog
Promising signs for open access in Canada
Canadian researchers have been strong supporters of BioMed Central's open access journals since day one - in fact BioMed Central has already published more than 1800 open access research articles from Canadian researchers. The good news for open access authors based in Canada is that their research funders are increasingly embracing open access, too.
Latest reports suggest that the Canadian Institute of Health Research is set to release an official policy on open access within the next few weeks. The draft policy has been available online for some time, and would require grantees to make resulting research articles available via an open access archive within 6 months of publication.
The CIHR already expicitly allows open access publication costs to be included in grant applications, but the following note:
49. It was suggested that CIHR implement a "page-charge reimbursement mechanism" that would lie outside of the grant itself. This would allow authors to get reimbursed for page charges for publications that were not anticipated in the grant application and may appear years after the grant has run out."
which appears in the report on the consultation process, suggests that CIHR may well go further, following Wellcome, the British Heart Foundation and the Arthritis Research Campaign (amongst others) by making central funding available to ensure that grantees always have the option to publish in an open access journal.
BioMed Central strongly supports the provision of such central funding for open access publication, which plays a vital role in ensuring that authors are able to publish in open access journals just as easily as in traditional journals (which already have the benefit of large-scale institutional support through library budgets).
Further positive news for open access in Canada comes in the form of reports from various sources indicating that the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), is now collaborating with CIHR to investigate the possibility of a Canadian version of PubMed Central.
So - if you are a Canadian biomedical researcher, watch this space...
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:01 Comments (0)
