Publishing Open Access

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and practices that make scholarly outputs freely and permanently available online, without paywalls or other barriers. Both OA and Open Science help maximize the visibility and impact of research outputs.

The University of Alberta Library (UAL) supports researchers in making articles, data sets, and other research outputs openly available and compliant with government policy and funder requirements.

The Government of Canada’s Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications is a funding agency mandate that will be changing on January 1, 2026. Updates will be shared here and through other channels once more details about the revised policy are known.

As a University of Alberta researcher, you can:

• Select a publisher that supports open access:
  • Identify Canadian diamond OA journals in your discipline by searching the Library’s SciFree Journal Search Tool, which also includes all OA journals hosted by UAL. (“Diamond OA” journals do not charge fees to authors or readers.)
  • Pay an article processing charge (APC) for your work to be shared OA. There are more than 10,000 journals for which U of A corresponding authors receive APC-free or -discounted publishing. Learn more on our APC Support page.
  • Identify other journals that support OA, via Open Policy Finder or the Directory of Open Access Journals.
  • Negotiate with your publisher to make your research available OA.
• Deposit your:
  • data sets in UAL-supported Dataverse
  • articles, conference presentations, etc. in the UAL’s institutional repository (ERA)
  • audio-visual works in the UAL’s digital curation platform (Aviary)