Investing in Open: Our Approach

TMU Libraries’ Commitment to Open Access

The TMU Libraries are committed to fostering sustainable, inclusive, and globally equitable access to knowledge by investing in and prioritizing open access initiatives. By investing in community-controlled, non-commercial infrastructures, the Libraries aim to support the long-term availability of TMU research and other scholarly research for our community and beyond.

TMU Libraries Open Access Policy

The Libraries’ commitment to Open Access is guided by its Open Access Policy which emphasizes the importance of freely available scholarly content. This policy outlines the Libraries’ strategic investment in OA resources and the prioritization of sustainable and community-controlled OA models. For more information, refer to the Library Open Access Policy: Toronto Metropolitan University Library Open Access Policy.

Open Access Support

Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries advances open access to Scholarly, Research and Creative (SRC) outputs produced at TMU by investing in:

RShare: TMU’s institutional repository, containing a wide range of research produced by TMU researchers and graduate students. At present there are more than 13, 200 items as of October 2025 in the repository. The repository also presents statistics on views and downloads.
Dataverse: Institutional data repository for researchers affiliated with TMU. This resource is part of Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada.
Open Journal Systems (OJS): TMU Libraries hosts four active open access publications, as well as a number of inactive publications. OJS is a professional journal hosting platform with a built-in peer review management system.
Open Access Platforms and infrastructure: TMU Libraries supports a number of open access initiatives including Scholaris, Érudit, Canadiana and DOAJ in Canada and around the world
Copyright Training and Awareness: TMU Libraries provides copyright training to help researchers understand their author rights, copyright transfer agreements and open licensing terms.
Read and Publish Agreements: TMU Libraries participates in a number of publisher agreements, which provide article processing charge (APC) waivers or discounts for researchers publishing their articles with an open access license.

National Commitments to Open Access

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (2015)

The Tri-Agency policy on Open Access underscores the need for open access to publicly funded research, and has been in place since 2015. The policy requires researchers receiving grant funding from any of the three agencies (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC) must ensure that any peer-reviewed journal articles arising from their funding are freely accessible within 12 months of publication. Compliance Options include both journal archiving by publishing in journals that offer open access within 12 months, or repository deposit by placing the final peer-reviewed manuscript (self-archived or green version) in an open access repository within 12 months.

Tri-Agency Policy on Open Access is currently being updated. You can view what is being suggested in the Draft, Revised Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications.

Canada’s Roadmap for Open Science

Canada’s Roadmap for Open Science (2020) aimed to make federally funded science openly accessible. The roadmap prioritizes openness while respecting privacy, security, and ethical considerations. Key recommendations include:

Open Access: Make federal science articles accessible by 2022 and publications by 2023, respecting privacy and IP.
Open Data: Share federal research data using FAIR principles.
Collaboration: Enhance transparency through collaboration with external stakeholders, including Indigenous communities.

Towards Open Scholarship: A Canadian Research and Academic Library Action Plan to 2025

In 2023 CRKN drafted Towards Open Scholarship, their open access strategic plan that is current until 2025. This plan outlines shared priorities, strategies and actions to strengthen the national open scholarly ecosystem such as:

Build a balanced, sustainable, open scholarship system, while strengthening capacity and collaboration both nationally and globally
Investing in community-led shared infrastructure
Advance FAIR data and metadata standards
Uphold Indigenous Data Sovereignty (CARE, OCAP)
Support bilingual and multilingual publishing
Preserve Canada’s cultural and research heritage
Promote technical capacity and communities of practice to support stewardship and preservation of research outputs
Promote research integrity, openness and transparency

Open Access Investment Rationale

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.

– SPARC

Why Open Access Matters

Open Access (OA) supports academic goals while contributing to a more equitable and sustainable scholarly ecosystem.

1. Increase Scholarly Impact

More readers = more citations: OA articles are consistently cited more often because they are more widely accessible.
Global reach: Your work becomes available to researchers around the world, including those at institutions that cannot afford expensive journal subscriptions.
Interdisciplinary visibility: Scholars in adjacent fields can more easily discover and use your work, enhancing collaboration and cross-disciplinary citations.
Boost online visibility: OA works are indexed by major search engines (Google Scholar, PubMed Central, etc.), increasing discoverability.
Increase Research Quality: OA articles because they can be read widely and often share their results under open licence promote increased verification and reproducibility of research results.

2. Retain Rights

You keep your copyright: With OA, you often retain rights to share, reuse, or post your work on personal websites, course shells, or institutional repositories, especially if the work is licensed under a Creative Commons licence type.
Licensing on your terms: Creative Commons licenses let you choose how others may use your work, ensuring proper attribution and protection of integrity.
Avoid publisher restrictions: Traditional publishing often limits how and where you can share your own work — OA usually removes these barriers.

3. Support Teaching and Student Access

No-cost course materials: You and your students can legally and freely access and incorporate OA materials in assignments and readings via linking to open content or reusing and citing the work and license.
More current resources: OA ensures you have access to the latest research without waiting for library acquisitions or budget cycles.
Model open scholarship: Engaging with OA models responsible, ethical, and inclusive research practices for your students.

4. Comply with Funder and Institutional Policies

Funding agencies increasingly require OA: The Tri-Agencies, NIH, UKRI, and other research-funding agencies around the world often require that journal articles be made openly available within defined timeframes.

5. Advance Equity, Collaboration, and Public Good

Contribute to equitable knowledge sharing: OA levels the playing field for scholars, practitioners, and students globally, so academics and students who don’t have access to institutional subscriptions can read your work.
Aligns with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) OA supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by advancing equitable education (SDG 4), accelerating innovation (SDG 9), reducing global knowledge gaps (SDG 10), improving health outcomes via access to peer-reviewed health information (SDG 3), promoting transparency and informed policy (SDG 16), and enabling global research collaboration (SDG 17).
Promote interdisciplinary and community-engaged research: OA supports translation, reuse, and integration across sectors and geographies as Creative Commons licenses often support this.
Gives back to the public: Much research is publicly funded; OA ensures that the public — including patients, policymakers, and educators — can benefit from your findings. Making TMU research discoverable so that community members can access it is a key component of the University’s commitment to fostering meaningful community relationships and knowledge exchange with the broader community.

TMU Libraries Investment criteria

Open Access Evaluation Criteria Overview

TMU library supports licensing and initiatives that promote open, equitable, transparent, long-term and sustainable access to scholarly content. This guidance helps evaluate OA offers using defined principles and criteria. Our framework is guided by the OCUL Open Access Evaluation Criteria, developed by the OCUL-IR Open Access Working Group (2024). We will commit to reviewing new Open Access agreements through the lens of the following evaluation criteria and our listed priorities. When we seek out new Open Access Infrastructure investments to support we pledge to evaluate them using these key points.

TMU Libraries Evaluation Criteria:

We support Diamond and Green OA Models, and hybrid journals under certain conditions.
We support the ability of TMU Authors to retain the Rights to their work.
We require Fair and Transparent APC Policies.
We call for Reduced Financial Burden on Authors and Institutions.
Flexible Participation and Opt-Out Provisions.
We support Recognition of Indigenization, equity, diversity and inclusion and accessibility (IEDIA) in scholarly publishing
We support Technical Considerations that further Open Access.
We support Financial Transparency and Reporting.

Open Access Priorities

We prioritize Open Access opportunities for TMU authors, that correspond to TMU publishing patterns
We prioritize non-profit and non-commercial open access models, and providers that are committed to open access advocacy
We support Canadian open access infrastructure, including community-led infrastructure and publishers, bilingual publishing
We value research integrity and publishers that are committed to a thorough peer review process
We prioritize providers that acknowledge Indigenization, equity, diversity and inclusion and accessibility

Institutional Repositories: RShare and TMU Dataverse

RShare is Toronto Metropolitan University’s institutional repository and research collaboration platform for scholarly outputs produced by members of the Toronto Metropolitan University community and their collaborators. This repository disseminates and preserves the scholarly record of the university and makes it available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. It is also the home of the University’s online collection of PhD dissertations, Masters theses, Thesis Projects, and Major Research Papers.

RShare supports over 300 different file types (text, images, video, audio, 3D models) and allows for the viewing of these files within the browser. RShare hosts articles, theses, dissertations, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, and videos which can be made openly available to anyone on the web.

Researchers who deposit in RShare dramatically increase the discoverability of their work, and all posts stringently comply with funder and publisher requirements. Traditional metrics such as views and downloads along with Altmetrics (social media reach) are available for all items.

RShare Libguide: https://learn.library.torontomu.ca/RShare/

RShare FAQs: https://learn.library.torontomu.ca/RShare/FAQ

Toronto Metropolitan University Dataverse is the institutional data repository for researchers affiliated with Toronto Metropolitan University. Allows you to archive and/or share research data. The resource is part of Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. Datasets in TMU Dataverse are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), are widely discoverable and receive monthly integrity checks in combination with safe storage to protect against data loss and corruption. Submitted datasets require review and approval prior to publication.

Research Data Management Guide: https://learn.library.torontomu.ca/rdm

Depositing Data: https://learn.library.torontomu.ca/rdm/data_deposit

Open Data

Support for finding Open Data (https://learn.library.torontomu.ca/OER/data)

Article Processing Charge Discounts & Waivers

TMU Researchers currently have access to Article Processing Charge (APC) discounts that are available through the Library’s participation in publisher read and publish memberships.

APCs are fees paid by authors or institutions during the publication process in order to make articles Open Access. The result of an APC is that articles become freely available to anyone online. Paying an APC is optional, but if you choose to publish in a journal without using the APC pathway, your paper may be subject to restricted, paywalled access. APC discounts and waivers are covered by TMU Libraries for publisher agreements that are currently negotiated by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). There is no separate fund for APCs outside of these consortial agreements. For more information on Open Access publishing and APCs, visit our Scholarly Communication Research Guide.

This APC Tool is available to help you navigate discounts or waiver fees.

SciFree: Provides information on whether specific journals are financially supported through open access read and publish agreements. It indicates whether journals are fully covered by fee waivers for Article Processing Charges (APCs), offer partial discounts on APCs, or are not covered under any existing support arrangements. Search the database by journal title, ISSN, or keywords to check if the journal you plan to submit to is included in the current agreements.

See below for a list of current APC discounts and waivers that we subscribe to at TMU:

Publisher	Waivers / APC Discounts
American Chemical Society	$250 USD APC discount for all ACS journals
ACM Open	Full APC fee waiver
Cambridge University Press	Full APC fee waiver to publish in gold and hybrid journals
Canadian Science Publishing	25% discount to publish in hybrid journals; Full APC fee waiver for gold OA journals
Elsevier ScienceDirect onsite journals	Full APC fee waiver for hybrid journals; discount on most APCs for gold journal: 2024: 20%, 2025: 15%, 2026: 15%
Institute of Physics online journals.	Full fee waiver for select hybrid and gold journals
Oxford journals online	Full APC fee waiver for hybrid journals; 10% discount for gold journals
PLOS (Medicine only)	Full APC fee waiver
Royal Society of Chemistry online journals	Full APC fee waiver
SAGE journals	Full APC fee waiver for hybrid journals; 40% discount for gold journals
Taylor and Francis	25% discount on APCs for select hybrid journals
Wiley Open Access	Full APC fee waiver for hybrid journals; 10% discount for gold journals
Open Library of the Humanities	Full fee waiver

Note: For a glossary of open access terminology, visit the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions IFLA Open Access Vocabulary Guide.

Open Access Infrastructure Investments

TMU Libraries advance open access to scholarly research by investing in and supporting:

African Journals Online (AJOL) – an online service that provides access to African-published research, and increases worldwide knowledge of indigenous scholarship
arXiv – open-access archive scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics
Bioline International – not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries
Borealis – a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. Borealis supports open discovery, management, sharing, and preservation of Canadian research data
Canadiana.org, Heritage Project – project to digitize and provide perpetual online access to approximately 800 collections (60 million pages) from Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Gives academic researchers and individual Canadians unprecedented online access to a significant corpus of documentary heritage from the mid-1700’s to the mid-1900’s including: Papers and correspondence from Prime Ministers, other prominent politicians, Governors General, missionaries, poets, writers, artists and more
Center for Research Libraries (CRL ) Global Resources – provides access to primary and secondary source materials for international research, CRL Global Resources. Many of these collection materials are unique; most are unavailable from other sources.
DataCite – a global non-profit organization dedicated to making data and scholarly content more accessible and citable. DataCite’s core activity is providing digital object identifiers (DOI) and associated metadata registration. DOIs are persistent identifiers (PIDs) for digital objects which are widely used for identifying published content, datasets, and other scholarly research outputs. There are over 700,000 DOIs registered in Canada with DataCite.
Directory of Open Access Books – a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books
Directory of Open Access Journals – community-driven index of scholarly, peer-reviewed open access journals
Dryad – an open data publishing platform and a community committed to the open availability and routine re-use of all research data.
Erudit Partnership for Open Access (Coalition Publi.ca) – Canadian initiative advancing digital scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences
HathiTrust – a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 18+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy (JCCPE) – Subscribe to Open (S2O) model. JCCPE publishes timely, evidence-based policy and economics research that focuses on human-centered solutions to today’s most pressing climate challenges to support cities globally. An essential resource for the academic community and beyond, JCCPE provides a platform for scholarly research that empowers urban practitioners and policymakers with language, analysis, policies, and concrete actions that will reinvent and reinvigorate the idea of effective, purposeful government-led action and drive action in the climate agenda.
Make Data Count – an initiative that promotes the development of open data metrics to enable evaluation of data usage
MIT Press Direct-to-Open (D20) – moves scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model, where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model
Open Journal Systems hosted by Scholars Portal – software and infrastructure supporting Scholarly Journals at Brock
Open Citations – not-for-profit infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data
Open Library of Humanities (OLH) – A megajournal platform; a strongly peer-reviewed, quality-orientated, interdisciplinary space for hundreds of articles per year. It will also host a series of existing and new journals which not only accept submissions with full academic autonomy but whose content can be cross-curated from one journal to another, thereby empowering editors over and above journal brand. It has no author facing charges.
ORCID Canada Consortium (ORCID-CA) – promotes use of international standards for researcher identifiers in Canada
PhilPapers – largest open access archive in philosophy
Public Knowledge Project (PKP) – builds and supports open access publishing platforms for journals, books and preprints
ROR – community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations
RShare Digital Repository – Toronto Metropolitan University’s institutional repository and research collaboration platform for scholarly outputs produced by members of the Toronto Metropolitan University community and their collaborators
Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) Open Access Project – supports open access journal and book publishing
Sherpa Romeo now Open policy finder — provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) – supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design