Open Access

Athabasca University is the first university in Canada to create an open access scholarly press--AU Press. In keeping with its committment to the principles of open access, AU Press reduces barriers to knowledge. Access to all AU Press publications is free over the Internet and, wherever possible, its publications are licensed with Creative Commons.

About Open Access to Scholarly Information

The Open Access (OA) movement, begun in the 1990s by librarians and scholars, counteracts the privatization of knowledge, in which publishers make huge profits by selling academic journals to the libraries of universities whose scholars “trade” the fruits of their publicly funded intellectual endeavours for career advancement.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative is an important manifesto of the movement.

OA has worldwide support with organizations such as the UN, OECD and the IFLA.

Much evidence demonstrates that in practice, academic presses sell more books by making their content freely available on the web.

One of OA’s leading exponents is Dr. John Willinsky, of UBC and Stanford.
AU Press is a partner in his international Public Knowledge Research project, with other Canadian, American, and Australian universities to adapt the OJS (Open Journal Systems) publishing software for monographs, working title OMP (Open Monograph Press).

Dr. Willinsky's book, The Access Principle, (MIT Press 2006) is available in print, but you can also download sample chapters or the whole thing.

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) has released an Overview of Open Access Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Other Resources

• Some traditional academic publishers are “mythtakenly” against OA
• On the importance of OA in the developing world
• SSHRC has begun to support OA journals