Open Scholarship includes academic work that is made available to all users with no or minimal barriers to access...Open scholarship may include but is not limited to publishing open access articles and books, creating open educational resources, and publishing open data.

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Open Scholarship Policy Statement

Learn how you can practice open scholarship on the library's Open Access Research Guide.

Open scholarship makes USask research, scholarship, and teaching outputs accessible to everyone to build upon, learn from, or put into practice regardless of institutional affiliation, geographic location, or financial means.

Open scholarship facilitates discovery, replicability, and reuse – which increases the impact of academic work.

By reducing financial barriers to access, open scholarship can also support equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging – positively impacting the broader community.

To advance open scholarship, the University Library has made a number of commitments described in the Open Scholarship Position Statement with examples below.

Open advocacy

We advocate for more financially sustainable, ethical, and equitable open access publishing models and infrastructure controlled by and for the scholarly community. All members of the academic community have a role to play in supporting Sustainable Scholarship.

Open infrastructure

We maintain HARVEST, a digital repository which facilitates open access, better discovery, and long-term preservation for research, scholarly, and artistic work. USask researchers can make their outputs open access legally and for free and comply with funder policies through HARVEST.

Let us upload your work for you using our new HARVEST Upload Service. 

Open collections

The University Library has a dedicated fund to support open collections models, infrastructure and memberships aligned with our academic community's mission and values. We assess use of this fund based on our Criteria for Investing in Open Scholarship. These criteria include long-term potential for advancing open scholarship in an ethical, equitable and financially sustainable direction.

The University Library also participates in “read & publish” agreements (also known as transformative agreements) with several publishers. This means that in addition to paying for access to the paywalled content of the publisher the library also pays the open access publishing fees for USask authors. Other publishers offer USask authors discounts on these fees. See our Open Access Research Guide for more information.

Open Access Commitment

USask librarians and archivists are actively engaged in making the outputs of our own research, scholarship, and instructional outputs as openly available as possible. View our Open Access Commitment.

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