Editorial

Evidence Summary Theme: Open Access

Heather MacDonald

Associate Editor (Evidence Summaries)

Health and Biosciences Librarian

Carleton University

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

2024 MacDonald. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one.

DOI: 10.18438/eblip30665

Open access is the focus of the evidence summaries in this issue. The benefits of open access are familiar to many librarians. Making publicly funded research openly accessible serves a common good by advancing discovery and innovation, enhancing public welfare, providing an evidence base for sound policy, as well as many other societal benefits (Canadian Association of Research Libraries, 2013).

We have a short list of summaries this issue. The first article summarized investigates librarians’ perspectives on their role in promoting open access and the barriers and requirements for successful promotion. Next is a summary of an article that explores faculty perspectives on and experiences with open access and sharing of unpublished open content. The final evidence summary looks at an article that showcases techniques for archiving open access articles in an institutional repository. We hope these summaries provide useful to librarians involved in, or simply interested in, open access endeavors.

References

Canadian Association of Research Libraries. (2013). CARL Position Statement on Open Access. https://www.carl-abrc.ca/doc/2013-07-18_CARL_Position_Statement_on_Open_Access.pdf