We believe that scholarship should be available to the widest possible audience, regardless of wealth. We believe that the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) should be committed to ensuring free and neutral access to scholarship. We believe that scholarly journals should subscribe to Open Access principles, as articulated in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Therefore, we advocate that SSHRC adopt the following three requirements for recipients of SSHRC-issued grants.
Publish only in scholarly journals which require from the scholar no more than a reasonable, limited-term exclusive licence for commercial publication. The journal must not interfere at any time with the scholar's freedom to make his or her work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence or a licence not more restrictive.
Upon publication of the scholarship, the scholar must make an electronic version
of the scholarship freely-available to the public — in its commonly used format —
whether by posting it to a website maintained by themselves or contributing it to an Open Access Repository. [...]
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
