This year’s International Open Access Week centers on a powerful theme: “Who owns our knowledge?” It’s a call to action for academic and research communities to reflect on how knowledge is created, shared and controlled — and to reassert ownership over the intellectual outputs they produce.
At the University of Guelph, the McLaughlin Library is proud to support this movement through a range of open access initiatives that promote equity, transparency and community empowerment.
Some of the ways we do this are through:
- Supporting open access publishing and open access journal hosting (which enables faculty, students and researchers to host and manage peer-reviewed journals).
- Supporting Tri-Agency Compliance by offering guidance on using open access repositories and publishing in open access journals.
- Identifying and integrating Open Educational Resources (freely accessible and openly licensed textbooks, videos, podcasts, modules and more) into courses, making them more inclusive.
- Navigating copyright for authors and creators and Creative Commons licensing, including offering consultations to help people understand their publishing contracts. This provides researchers with resources for negotiating their contracts, including how to retain their rights.
- Negotiated publishing discounts for U of G authors who are interested in publishing in open access journals.
- Workshops and consultations on research data management.
- Providing guidance on preparing datasets for deposit into the University of Guelph Research Data Repositories, ensuring compliance with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).
Learn more on the U of G Library website.
Have questions? Contact the library.