Our Commitment to Open Access

Open access is a core value of the University of Guelph Library and one of our Strategic Initiatives. We invest in these open access initiatives:

• We allocate a portion of our acquisitions budget to support open content, infrastructure and software that support open scholarship.
• We have developed an Institutional Research Data Management Strategy, in partnership with the Office of Research, to ensure research data is made publicly available whenever possible.
• We endorse MIT’s Framework for Publisher Contracts to support the transformation of the scholarly publication system so it is economically sustainable and ensures the widest possible readership for publicly funded research.

Our open investment strategy

McLaughlin Library mobilizes open scholarship through strategic investments in open access investments. We believe in being transparent about how we decide to allocate the library’s open access budget. See Open Investment Evaluation Criteria for more information on how we evaluate investments. 

Our open investments

We support these organizations which promote open access through advocacy, open access content, and infrastructure for open access publishing: 

• Annual Reviews - Subscribe to Open
• Archive-It
• Authors Alliance
• Bioline journals
• Canadiana
• Coalition Publi.ca
• Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
• Crossref
• Dataverse
• Datacite
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)
• Erudit
• HathiTrust
• IWA Publishing - Subscribe to Open
• Library Publishing Coalition
• MDPI
• MIT Press: Direct to Open ebooks
• OAPEN (Online Library and Publication Platform)
• Ontario Library Research Cloud
• Open Book Publishers
• Open Citations
• Open Journal Systems
• Open Library of the Humanities
• ORCID
• PhilPapers
• PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine - Community Action Publishing
• Pressbooks
• Public Knowledge Project
• punctumbooks
• SCOAP3
• SCOSS
• SPARC
• Unsub

Our position on ResearchGate & Academia.edu

ResearchGate and Academic.edu are privately held companies with no mandate to preserve your research, nor to ensure it is available to others moving forward. These sites require a user to create an account--something many researchers are not comfortable doing. They also contravene intellectual property law.  

We recommend you do not load your own research onto these sites. To create a true record of your scholarship, and know that the content you have made available will remain that way in the future, reach out to the library to discuss your options, including making your work available in our institutional repository.