Open access in Canada

Open access is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. In Canada, open access policy has developed and expanded for nearly 20 years. The Institutes of Health Research effected a policy of open access in 2008, which in 2015 expanded to include the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. In 2025, the Tri-Agency (comprising the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) released a draft, revised open access policy.

There are also established Canadian organizations that pursue or support open access activities. The Public Knowledge Project began in 1998 at University of British Columbia. The Canadian Research Knowledge Network was launched in 1999 (as the Canadian National Site Licensing Project), and facilitates open access to research via licensing agreements with publishers and the Partnership for Open Access (with ÃÂrudit). ÃÂrudit, a Canadian scholarly journal platform, has been operating since 1998. Together, ÃÂrudit and the Public Knowledge Project formed Coalition Publica in 2017. In 2023, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and Canadian Association of Research Libraries released a library action plan in support of open scholarship in Canada. Notable Canadian advocates for open access include Leslie Chan, Jean-Claude GuÃÂ©don, Stevan Harnad, Heather Morrison, and John Willinsky.

Repositories

There are some 88 collections of scholarship in Canada housed in digital open access repositories.

Timeline

Key events in the development of open access in Canada include the following:

1994
27 June: Stevan Harnad posts a Subversive Proposal calling on authors to archive their articles for free online. ÃÂ
1998
Public Knowledge Project (PKP) established by John Willinsky
1998
French-language ÃÂrudit online publishing platform launched, as a university-based initiative with the ambition to create digital tools and offer services to scholarly journals
2000
PKP releases first open source software package, Open Conference Systems (OCS), which it supports until 2014
2002
PKP launched Open Journals Systems (OJS) as an open source journal publishing platform
2003
12 Canadian universities host OA journals on their IRs (Institutional Repositories)
2005
SFU Dean of Libraries Lynn Copeland initiates PKP partnership with Simon Fraser University Library and the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing, led by Rowly Lorimer.
2006
November: Athabasca University begins policy encouraging deposits in its institutional repository.
2009
October: York University begins open access policy.
2017
Coalition Publica founded to support publishing in social sciences and humanities fields.

Journals

Les Presses de l'UniversitÃÂ© de MontrÃÂ©al issued one of the world's first open access journals, Surfaces () in 1991.
FACETS is Canada's first multidisciplinary open access journal in Canada.
Anthropocene Coasts, is a multidisciplinary international open access journal jointly published by Canadian Science Publishing and East China Normal University.
Arctic Science is a quarterly open-access peer-reviewed journal.

In addition, Canadian universities and research institutions support and / or host the following journals:

Acadia University