MRU Library Website: Open MRU Library: OPEN MRU Library

Banner

Open at MRU

Open Access, Open Data, Open Research, and Open Educational Resources are all part of a movement to help equalize access to education and scholarship by fostering an inclusive way to create and disseminate knowledge.

Quick Links

Open Publishing

Publish openly with support: Explore your open publishing options, apply for the Library's Open Access Fund, find no-cost and APC discounted publishing venues, and learn the basics of open licensing.

What is Open Scholarship?

Also known as Open Science, Open Scholarship is a movement to make research, data, teaching materials, and publications openly accessible. It promotes transparency, collaboration, trust, reproducibility, and equity by removing barriers to knowledge and encouraging open practices throughout the research and teaching lifecycle.

At MRU, we support open scholarship by helping our community share their work and adopt open practices through repositories, open publishing support, and open education services.

Open Access

Open Scholarship expands research access and impact by eliminating barriers. MRU supports open access through our Institutional Repository and Open Journal Hosting, where MRU research and scholarship can be made freely and immediately available. We also provide publishing support and consultations on author options, including Creative Commons licensing.

Open Education

Open education contributes to barrier-free academic resources accessible to all learners. By incorporating open educational resources (OER) into instruction, faculty help create a more equitable and sustainable model for education.

Open Data

Sharing research data and code (when ethical and appropriate) supports reproducibility, collaboration, and transparency. MRU provides services and infrastructure to support data sharing, including the MRU Data Repository.

Open Research

Transparency across the research process—including methods, peer review, and public engagement—builds trust and accelerates discovery. MRU supports open research practices throughout the full research lifecycle.

Why Publish Open Access?

Increased access and audience

Open access publications are freely available, giving anyone, anywhere, the ability to find, read, and share research. Unlike profit-driven subscription publications, OA resources do not charge subscription fees or require users to pay before they can view the content.

Citation advantage

With more people reading your work, better access leads to increased citation rates for authors. Known as the open access citation advantage, several studies have demonstrated the value of OA.

Publicly-funded research belongs to the public

In Canada, most researchers working at universities receive public funding, through grants and salaries, to conduct research. The research funded by public tax dollars should be available to the public as quickly as possible.

Rigorous and high quality research

Misperceptions around the quality of open access publications remain, and some people continue to perceive articles published in open access journals as lower quality than those published in “traditional’ journals. While some predatory publishers do exist, the truth is that legitimate OA journals use the same quality control processes, including rigorous peer-review, editorial oversight, systems for retraction, and expectations of professional and ethical behaviour by researchers and publishers.

Library position statement on open access:

In 2014 the Library Faculty Council affirmed the Library's commitment to open access with this position statement.

Copyright and Open Access

Copyright and Open Access

In most cases, authors who publish via an open access model retain more rights over their works than when publishing under a profit-driven model. Authors who publish via open access agree to the right of reuse, allowing unrestricted distribution (downloading, copying, sharing, storing, and printing) of the full-text work, so long as the original author is given credit. To communicate these flexible terms of use, authors may choose to license their works under an open copyright license, such as Creative Commons.

For more information on author rights, see the 2019 CARL Guide to Author Rights.
To search for permissions given by publishers as part of a journal publisher's copyright transfer agreement see the Open Policy Finder tool.
For more information about copyright and research/scholarship, visit the MRU Copyright Libguide.