Open Access

Publishing with a high-quality open access publisher is a great way to make your work openly available so that people within and beyond the academy can benefit from your research. If you publish with an open access journal which appears in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), or that meets the criteria to be listed there, you may be eligible for funding from the SFU Central Open Access Fund to cover some of all of the Article Processing Charges. 

Open Choice / Hybrid

Hybrid journals are subscription-based publications for which authors can pay an “open choice” fee to "unlock" their  individual papers and make them freely available to any reader. Rather than making the entire journal open access, these publishers charge a fee to make individual articles openly available, while the rest are locked behind a subscription paywall. Although publishers claim to redirect the funds from these APCs to reduce the cost of subscriptions and licenses, there is insufficient evidence that this is actually happening. Since the library already pays a subscription fee to access most articles in the journal, we are unfortunately not able to help cover the APCs to make individual articles openly available.

What this means for open access policies

If you are required to adhere to a funding mandate, such as the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, you can meet your open access requirements by: 

1. Publishing in an open access or a hybrid journal. Be sure to follow our guidelines on assessing a publisher, journal, or conference to insure you select a high-quality publisher.
2. Submitting your work to an open access repository, such as SFU's Summit.

To adhere to SFU's open access policy, SFU researchers are asked to place their work in Summit immediately upon publication.