The University of Ottawa took bold steps towards opening up its wealth of academic knowledge to the world today, announcing a new open access policy that is the first of its kind among Canadian universities. Ottawa U will now join the ranks of highly-respected schools such as Berkeley, Cornell, MIT and Harvard.

From the Ottawa U Website, an explanation of what open access will mean:

• a commitment to make the University’s scholarly publications available online at no charge through the University’s repository, uO Research;

• an author fund to help researchers defray open access fees charged by publishers;

• a fund to support the creation of digital educational materials organized as courses and available to everyone online at no charge ;

• support for the University of Ottawa Press’s commitment to publishing a collection of open access books; and

• a research grant to support further research on the open access movement.

I have talked about the merits of open access before and I hope other Canadian schools soon follow suit. For the full press release from the University of Ottawa, go here.

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