As we work towards our vision to make knowledge accessible to all, CRKN is actively supporting open access (OA) publishing initiatives. Publishing open access ensures that research publications are freely and openly available online, enabling widespread access to evidence-based knowledge. Any use or reuse of open access content is still subject to full and proper attribution and will have an appropriate license, typically through the Creative Commons suite of licenses.
Interested in publishing open access? Use the search bar below to find the open access publishing options for journals covered by CRKN agreements.
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CRKN’s Pathways to Open Access
Guided by our members and the Content Strategy Committee, CRKN pursues multiple pathways to open access to advance the evolution of open research and facilitate seamless research communication.
Partnership for Open Access
The Partnership for Open Access (POA) provides financial support to non-commercial scholarly journals through the ongoing commitment of library partners and is based on a close collaboration between all stakeholders of the research ecosystem.
Community Initiatives
CRKN is committed to fostering community initiatives that advance open access. We actively seek opportunities to work with institutions, organizations, and publishers to create a more accessible and equitable scholarly landscape.
Read and Publish Agreements
Read and publish agreements are a form of transformative agreement that allow authors to publish open access immediately without any article processing charges (APCs). These agreements take the library’s existing expenditure on journal subscriptions and repurpose it to cover both reading and OA publishing in that publisher’s journals at no cost to authors.
APC Discounts
The Content Strategy Committee has negotiated article processing charge (APC) discounts with a number of publishers for gold and hybrid OA publishing. These negotiated APC discounts reflect our commitment to making OA scholarly publishing more accessible.
Types of Open Access
Diamond open access is a scholarly publication model in which journals do not charge fees to authors and readers. Diamond open access journals are often community-driven, academic-led, and academic-owned publishing initiatives.
Gold open access ensures that the final version of an article or book is freely accessible for everyone on the publisher’s platform, immediately after publication. This type of open access usually requires paying an APC (article processing charge) or a book processing charge (BPC). A gold open access journal has all its content available open access, through APCs.
Green open access, also known as self-archiving, is making publications freely available via an open access repository. After publication in a subscription journal, an author accepted manuscript (AAM) is also placed in an open access repository, such as an institutional repository. Publishers may impose an embargo period, during which open access is restricted.
A hybrid journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This usually requires the payment of a publication fee (APC) to the publisher by the author. If the author chooses not to pay the APC, the article is only available to readers with access to an institutional subscription or who have purchased access.
Towards Open Scholarship: A Canadian Research and Academic Library Action Plan to 2025
Developed collaboratively, this document outlines the ways in which CRKN and CARL are leading a robust, multi-pronged open scholarship strategy that considers recent significant changes to the field, and how we plan to maintain alignment within this complex landscape.