Scholarly publishers have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak by providing immediate, free open access to research on their platforms. This blog post summarizes what each publisher has made available, highlights the responses of funding agencies worldwide, and illustrates why open access to research saves lives. 

The SFU Library hosted an event to celebrate GIS Day on November 13, 2019, at SFU Harbour Center.

This blog post will be useful to those interested in advanced library research particularly people who are doing literature reviews.

As early career researchers, you might have heard of your colleagues discuss rejection rates/acceptance rates for scholarly journals. 

How are rejection rates/acceptance rates calculated? 

Unfortunately, the journal industry does not have a set standard on calculating rejection rates/acceptance rates. Some things journals could consider: 

In recent weeks, you may have seen a call for applications to the SFU Open Educational Resources (OER) grants program (note: current deadline is November 7th). This program provides funding of up to $5,000 along with staff support to help faculty members redesign a course to adopt or adapt open textbooks or other OER as their primary course material.

It can be daunting to think about your thesis or dissertation being openly available in Summit for anyone to find and read. You may have heard concerns about plagiarism, predatory publishers or limitations on your ability to publish a manuscript based on your openly available thesis. Be reassured that, for the most part, these concerns are unwarranted. Most universities in Canada make their students' theses and dissertations open.

Happy Open Access Week from SFU Library!

Whether you’re a new graduate student, a student new to designing or running research projects, or a researcher looking for support on a specific aspect of the research life cycle - we can help!

In the Research Commons, we offer workshops and consultations on a wide variety of topics that support research at all stages of the research life cycle.

We discussed predatory journals in a previous blog post, but you may have also heard of predatory conferences. Conferences are an important piece of the scholarly publishing world, and give you valuable opportunities to present research and network with colleagues. Just as it’s important to do research on journals before publishing, it’s important to look into conferences you are thinking of attending. Poor quality and deceptive conferences can be hard to spot; here is some information on what to look for, and how they operate. 

The University of California recently took a bold step in support of open access publishing by terminating subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. We asked SFU Faculty for their thoughts on the cancellation and what this means for open access.