Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication is an umbrella term that encompasses all of the ways that researchers and/or scholars communicate knowledge about a particular subject. The whole system of scholarly communications, from the way research is funded, results are produced, data is organized, and results are distributed continues to change. There are many issues for libraries and librarians, faculty, researchers, students, and institutions to consider. These include: open access, copyright, preprints, article processing charges, costs of published research, by funding agency requirements, and repositories of articles and data.

At the Library, there are several avenues for supporting scholarly communication at Laurier. These include:

• outreach and consultation for faculty and students
• maintaining an Institutional Repository, Scholars Commons @ Laurier
• providing APC discounts
• investigating and supporting open access, including support for OA infrastructure

The Library also has a program to support Research Data Management.

• American Chemical Society (ACS) journals
  • Discount: $250 USD discount on the ACS Author Choice Open Access Service
  • Why: Benefit of the Library’s subscription to the ACS All Publications page 
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address.
• Cambridge University Press (CUP) journals
  • Discount: No charge for OA publishing on CUP hybrid and gold journals 
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-CUP transformative agreement 
  • How: The discount will be automatically applied when you use your Laurier email address. See the CUP Author Journey for details 
• Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) journals
  • Discount: Free OA Publishing on 5 journals and a 25% discount on 14 other CSP titles. This excludes FACETS. 
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-CSP agreement 
  • Eligible Journals: Free OA Publishing titles are Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Canadian Journal of Physics, Contaminants, Environment, and Society (OA), Genome, and Transaction of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering
  • Eligible Journals for 25% discount: Please contact the library for support.
  • Ineligible Journals: This agreement excludes Arctic Science, Drone Systems and Applications, and FACETS 
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address.
• Company of Biologists journals 
  • Discount: APCs are covered for all Company of Biologists titles
  • Why: Benefit of the Laurier-Company of Biologists Read-and-Publish agreement
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address. See the CoB Author Workflow for details. Laurier Is listed under the unlimited OCUL Read-and-Publish agreement.
• Elsevier journals (via ScienceDirect)
  • Discount: Full APC coverage on over 1800 hybrid journals, and a smaller discount (15% in 2026) on a Gold journals. 
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-Elsevier transformative agreement 
  • Eligible Journals:  Browse journals via CRKN. Note that the 3rd tab in the browsing spreadsheet list Gold journals, which do not have full APC coverage 
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting.  Use your Laurier email address.  See the Elsevier Author Workflow for details.
• JMIR Journals 
  • Discount: 10% APC discount on JMIR Publications' journals
  • Why: Benefits of the CRKN-JMIR agreement
  • How: Eligible authors accepted for publication can obtain their discount code and supporting workflows documentation from JMIR.
• Oxford University Press (OUP) journals 
  • Discount: APCs are waived completely for Hybrid journals, and a 10% discount is applied to Gold journals
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-OUP Read-and-Publish agreement
  • Eligible Journals: Browse the Hybrid (full discount) and Gold (10% discount) journals via CRKN.
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address. See the OUP workflow for details
• Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals
  • Discount: APCs are fully waived for all hybrid and gold journals
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-RSC agreement
  • Eligible Journals: All hybrid and gold RSC journals. Please contact the library for support.
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address. See the RSC workflow for details
• Sage journals 
  • Discount: APCs are fully waived for eligible hybrid journals. A 40% discount is applied to most Gold journals.
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-Sage agreement
  • Eligible Journals: Browse the Hybrid (full discount) and Gold (40% discount) journals via CRKN
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address. See the Sage author workflow for details
• Taylor and Francis (T&F) journals
  • Discount: 25% APC discount on T&F Open Select hybrid journals
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-T&F agreement
  • Eligible Journals: Browse the T&F Open Select titles via CRKN
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address
• Wiley Online Library journals
  • Discount: APCs are fully waived for research articles, case studies, protocols, and certain other publication types in Wiley's hybrid journal articles. A 10% discount is applied to Gold OA journals.  
  • Why: Benefit of the CRKN-Wiley agreement
  • Eligibility. Eligibility is determined by the article classification as well as at the journal type. Browse Wiley's list of Hybrid journals via CRKN.  Authors should ensure their output meets the classification type and be in a Hybrid journal for the full APC discount. 
  • How: Corresponding authors must indicate affiliation when submitting. Use your Laurier email address. See the Wiley author workflow for details

Other Discounts

• Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library
  • ACM provides a discount in the Library's pricing for access based on APCs paid to it by Laurier researchers.  

It is important to understand your rights and to read what you are signing.

Author Agreements

There will be some sort of agreement for you to sign or click through. You should understand what you are agreeing to. This is important to retain for your records.

You can ask for changes to your author agreements, your success in negotiating those changes will be dependent on the publisher. One resource is SPARC Canadian Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles.

Copyright

There are two parts to this.  The first relates to the creation of your work, if you are reproducing something (table, photo, etc.) that is not yours.  You will want to know what is allowable.  The second issue is who owns your copyright once it is published.  Pay attention to what the author agreement says around copyright and reuse. 

OA publishers will often use a creative commons license.

Versions

You will produce many versions of your work during the process. There are two versions that you will want to keep track of, especially depending on what your author agreement says you can do them

• Final publisher version - this is the final version, as it is printed by the publisher
• Post-print - is the final version before it is formatted by the publisher for the publication.

Publisher Policies

If you are looking for where to publish and what to know what the policies of the publisher are, you can search on the publisher website or for journals you can look in Sherpa Romeo. You can also look under the APC heading above for publishers that provide APC discounts.

Open Access (OA) is a movement which encourages scholarly information to be made available to the widest possible readership.  Many funders, including the Tri-Agencies, require some level of open access as a condition of their funding.  An OA research output should:

• be free to the user
• be available immediately (i.e. No publisher restrictions)
• have a permanent location or persistent identifier, like a DOI 
• have an online format

Types of open access

There are many different OA models, which can confuse readers and authors at the point of access or publicaiton.  There are many different types of open access, here are a few of the key ones

• Green allows for articles to be OA, usually not the final published version, usually hosted in an institutional repository, such as Laurier’s Scholars Commons. It is often at no cost, but there may be an embargo period.
• Gold is OA for the final published version with hosting in a repository allowed, often a fee is charged.
• Diamond/Platinum publishing refers to those open access journals that contain peer-reviewed research which publishers make immediately and completely available at no cost.
• Gratis is the term for items that have some permission barriers, often related to copyright or licensing.
• Libre OA is the term for items that have removed most or all of the permission barriers.

Other Library support for OA Initiatives

• Coalition Publi.ca - a strategic partnership created by Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project. It is dedicated to the advancement of research dissemination and digital publishing in the social sciences and humanities.
• DOAJ - is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
• Erudit - is full-text, peer reviewed Canadian journal articles, chiefly in French. Erudit is an inter-university consortium promoting the dissemination of scholarly research. While not fully OA, we are supporting their efforts towards greater OA and in developing a new model of publishing
• HathiTrust - is a non-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving digitized books.
• Open Library of the Humanities - is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). Funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined in the mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.
• ORCID - provides a persistent unique digital identifier for researchers to support research workflows, linkages between you and your work. ORCID-CA is the Canadian consortium of institutions in Canada that have memberships with ORCID to financially support the work of ORCID and leverage community support services.
• SCOAP3 - is working with leading publishers and has converted key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors. SCOAP3 is centrally paying publishers for the costs involved in providing Open Access, publishers in turn reduce subscription fees to all their customers, who can contribute to SCOAP3.

Scholars Commons @ Laurier is Laurier's Institutional Repository, more information can be found on the site and on the Scholars Commons library webpage.

ORCID provides researchers with a unique identifier for researchers to identify their work.  This is managed by open, global, not-for-profit organization.  Create your ORCID on their site. For more information, view this tutorial or contact Charlotte.