Open Publishing, Support, and Open Infrastructure
introducing & contextualizing my career, labour, and expertise in ten sweet minutes
Mike Nason
Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian
Research Celebration week, 2025
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Over 20 years of facilitating scholarly journal publication with free, open-source software. In concert with – and in support of – national and international efforts encouraging Diamond Open Access, ethical, equitable publishing, and returning control of scholarly publishing to researchers.
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Helping researchers navigate open access, funder mandates, journal policies, author's rights curiosities, publisher workflows and the iterative products of publishing. Weeping. Gesticulating.
Promoting and supporting publishing literacy.
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But, also, UNB Scholar is about making work accessible to the people of New Brunswick.
Facilitating open access means providing locations and solutions for self-archiving and funder mandate compliance. Our institutional repository, UNB Scholar, is that place.
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Increasingly we work in the space of persistent identifier support and literacy. From article and dataset DOIs to ORCIDs for researchers and ROR IDs for institions, we help build the connective tissues of open scholarly infrastructure to improve discoverability, citeability, and disambiguation while, ideally, reducing researcher time burdens.
CDS Publishing Services & Journal Hosting
Support & Hosting
Currently home to over fifteen active scholarly journals, two student journals, and four conference proceeding publications, the Centre for Digital Scholarship has leveraged Open Journal Systems for over two decades and been an enthusiastic supporter and participant in the library publishing community.
BUILDing expertise
We work alongside our editors to promote publishing best practice, metadata services, dissemination and indexing advice, technical support, and persistent identifiers, and metrics. Most recently, we worked with Acadiensis to facilitate their SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals grant.
National Initiatives
A partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. Together with libraries, this MSI and CFI-funded initiative supports the social sciences and humanities journal community in the transition towards sustainable OA.
Over the course of the last year, it has been a pleasure to work closely with the UNB journal Acadiensis, as the update their web presence and pivot to fully digital publishing workflows. Theirs is a long-standing (25+ year) relationship with CDS.
Proceedings
Acadiensis press
Student journals
Open scholarship & publishing support
advocacy 101
Navigating modern academic publishing isn't super easy. There's open access mandates. There's an often broad – albeit just as often false – impression that open access is supposed to cost researchers money. There's rising Author Processing Charges. So-called "predatory journals", solicitation, fake publications, an enormous range of publishers (from the independent, not-for-profits to the toweringly-wealthy oligopolies) and copyright/licensing concerns. Let's not forget economic downturns, trade wars, and a broadly thoughtless push for GenAI to dismantle reality.
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advocating for authors to retain their rights
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navigating publisher policies & publishing options
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understanding open access, apcs, and mandates
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unpacking esoteric language and publisher workflows
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Working to ensure research is as available as possible
libraries support researchers
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your work is your work until you decide otherwise
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navigating publisher policies & publishing options
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understanding open access, apcs, and mandates
-
unpacking esoteric language and publisher workflows
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Working to ensure research is as available as possible
libraries support researchers
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your work is your work until you decide otherwise
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researchers ought to publish with intention
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understanding open access, apcs, and mandates
-
unpacking esoteric language and publisher workflows
-
Working to ensure research is as available as possible
libraries support researchers
-
your work is your work until you decide otherwise
-
researchers ought to publish with intention
-
OA doesn't have to cost money, but the tradeoff is time
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unpacking esoteric language and publisher workflows
-
Working to ensure research is as available as possible
libraries support researchers
-
your work is your work until you decide otherwise
-
researchers ought to publish with intention
-
OA doesn't have to cost money, but the tradeoff is time
-
It's hard find/understand your options... we can help
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Working to ensure research is as available as possible
libraries support researchers
-
your work is your work until you decide otherwise
-
researchers ought to publish with intention
-
OA doesn't have to cost money, but the tradeoff is time
-
It's hard find/understand your options... we can help
-
is your work as available as you think it is?
libraries support researchers
It's also not not worth the sidebar to suggest that relegating most of publishing literacy to discipline-based folk wisdom is definitely not sufficient education for the next generation of researchers and scholars.
Graduate students must grasp the workings of the industry that distributes their work.
repositories
self archiving
When you need to make your work available, you can nearly always store a version of it in our institutional repository. I can help you find out which versions you can post here.
It is not just for articles. We have:
- theses/dissertations
- reports
- posters
- slide decks
- proceedings
- and many other types of works...
self archiving
We've had a lot of uptake, in particular, from folks running research institutes who want a consistent and backed-up place to store their publications, reports, and other materials. And DataNB (formerly NBIRDT), in particular, have really embraced the repo to make their work available.
For just DataNB, this is ~200 items across 7 disciplines, and growing regularly.
mandate compliance
There is a new Tri-Agency OA Policy for journal articles on the horizon. Based on what we know thus far, you can anticipate the following:
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immediate OA on Publication
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Required repository deposit
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The introduction of a new rights retention strategy to facilitate easier self-archiving
this why we have a repository and very much what it is for.
open scholarly infrastructure
Persistent identifiers
ROR
As ORCID works for researchers, so too does ROR work for research organizations. The Research Organization Registry works to expose the connections between scholars, funders, publications, and institutions.
ORCID
ORCID, standing for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID", a free persistent identifier for researchers, is an invaluable tool for author disambiguation, automatic/automagical metadata recovery, portable scholar CVs that follow them through their career, and, increasingly, a tool for keeping track of publications and submitting metadata for research grants.
DOIs via DataCite / Crossref
We support DOI registration agencies like Crossref and DataCite and have memberships with each. DOIs help facilitate discovery and access to scholarly research, and are a foundational part of the connective tissues of open scholarly infrastructure.
Open scholarly Infrastructure
Platforms and systems meant to proliferate, expose, and disseminate scholarly research, metadata, and connections. Founded on principles of open, transparent governance, code preservation, public trust, sustainable financial models, open source, open science, and community cooperation, OSI represents an effort to democratize not only research but information about research.
UNB Libraries are ardent supporters of Open Scholarly Infrastructure across literacy efforts, research, advocacy, and financial support via initiatives like SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services.
Open scholarly Infrastructure
Bespoke services with proprietary technology and closed code not only cost the institution more money, but shackle it to ongoing costs, upkeep, and vendor lock-in. But so much of this data is already openly available.
ideally
This brief blast through the work to which we are deeply committed in the space of open scholarship and publishing has given you some impression as to why we care about this labour.
So much of the work of this institution is opaque to the people of our province or broader communities of professional practice for which research may be significantly less accessible.
Open science, open access, open publishing, and open data are a public good that benefits UNB in kind.
