Transitioning to open access (OA)
This paper presents a summary of three presentations: Heather Joseph of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) on key advocacy strategies, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’s (CARL) Kathleen Shearer on the CARL Institutional Repository program and forthcoming CARL Author’s Addendum, and Heather Morrison on the Canadian Library Association’s (CLA) Task Force on Open Access. The presentations were followed by a one–hour workshop, with about 50 participants including librarians from Canada and elsewhere, publishers, and others. Workshop exercises, designed for the expert audience anticipated at the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, were developed to elicit a broad overview of open access initiatives underway, issues and barriers to open access, and solutions to overcome them. Participants reported being engaged in a wide variety of open access initiatives, from OA publishing and institutional repositories to a recent commitment to devote a percentage of a university budget to OA. Two solutions the workshop participants saw as key for open access were finding a funding solution (possibly re–deploying collections and acquisitions budgets or earmarking grants funds for knowledge transfer), and branding repositories as containing trustable material. The workshop portion could have been expanded considerably, to a half or full day. Results of the workshop will help to inform the work of the CLA Task Force on Open Access.
