As part of the Open Access week (October 25-31, 2021), the Douglas Research Centre (DRC) is announcing its own Open Access policy.
By supporting Open Access publishing, the DRC aims to foster transparency, reproducibility, and equity of access to scientific knowledge. Open Access publishing significantly benefits non-academic audiences, such as educators, healthcare professionals, and policymakers. A survey carried out with ca. 6000 users of Springer Nature websites revealed that approximately 40% of them self-identified as non-academic audiences, including users likely to be reading research for professional purposes as well as general readers. Among the latter, a large number of respondents reported giving up when they cannot access a document (Wirsching et al., 2020).
Find out more about Open Access at the Douglas
The DRC Open Access policy focuses specifically on Open Access publishing of peer-reviewed journal publications, and follows the requirements outlined by the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ). The policy aims to support authors in complying with Open Access mandates from funding institutions, by providing contextualized information on how to achieve Open Access publishing goals within the DRC’s specific environment. Two modalities of Open Access publishing are equally accepted: paid Open Access and self-archiving of post-prints (green Open Access).
Contact the Open Science team for support.