OTTAWA, December 8, 2009 — The University of Ottawa is the first Canadian university to adopt a comprehensive open access program that supports free and unrestricted access to scholarly

research.

The University’s new program includes:

• a commitment to make the University’s scholarly publications available online at no charge through the University’s repository, uO Research;

• an author fund to help researchers defray open access fees charged by publishers;

• a fund to support the creation of digital educational materials organized as courses and available to everyone online at no charge ;

• support for the University of Ottawa Press’s commitment to publishing a collection of open access books; and

• a research grant to support further research on the open access movement.

The University of Ottawa also becomes the first Canadian university to join the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), adding its name to a list of prestigious institutions including Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. The signatories of this compact make a commitment to support open access journals that make articles available at no charge to everyone while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, services such as management of the peer review process, production and distribution.

University of Ottawa researchers have already participated in many significant open access projects. These projects include developing the Canadian Creative Commons license, which ensures authors retain the right of attribution and that their work is accessible; under the leadership of Michael Geist and Ian Kerr, the publication of legal texts that are made available at no charge; and the founding of Open Medicine and Aporia, two open access journals in the fields of medicine and health sciences.

“I am proud that our university is the first one in the country to introduce a comprehensive open access program. Canada’s university has become Canada’s Open Access University,” said Allan Rock, president and vice-chancellor at the University of Ottawa. “The fruit of our faculty’s contributions to academic research will now be more visible, freely accessible and shared with the world.”

Open access research can be easily accessed by anyone, anywhere, without the barrier of costly journal subscription or association membership fees. Broad dissemination of knowledge and research without access barriers is a great benefit to society as a whole.

For more information on the University of Ottawa’s open access program, visit www.oa.uOttawa.ca.