Open access - the practice of freely sharing scholarly outputs online -- is steadily garnering support across the research community. At academic institutions, libraries are usually the standard-bearers for this trend, advancing open scholarship by providing services, infrastructure and funding - for example, employing scholarly communication experts, operating institutional repositories, and funding open access publication costs. This investment in personnel and resources reflects a shared priority of advancing more equitable systems for creating and sharing knowledge. Our professional organizations publicly espouse these values and engage in advocacy to advance open access projects and uptake. At an institutional level, library workers often lead the development of campus open access policies which encourage or commit researchers to publicly share their work. In Canada, nine academic institutions and ten libraries/librarian councils have adopted open access policies. Despite this wealth of activity and public professions of support for open scholarship, it is unclear whether academic librarians in Canada actually practice what we preach. Most of the open access statements/policies adopted by libraries merely encourage workers to make their scholarship freely available. Anecdotal evidence indicates a minority of us are actually archiving our work in institutional repositories or publishing in open access journals. This paper will provide preliminary results from a survey exploring how Canadian academic librarians’ professional, personal and collective values impact our publishing practices. In particular, results from this study will indicate how academic freedom provisions -- articulated in collective agreements, institutional policies and by professional organizations including CAPAL and CAUT -- may affect whether we choose to support open access with our words and actions. Academic freedom is usually appreciated as a protective measure, guarding librarians and faculty against repercussions for work or speech which may be viewed as controversial. Independently choosing how to disseminate research is often a key tenet of academic freedom policies. Accordingly, librarians may experience tension between our personal/professional support for the principle of open access and our will to exert academic freedom and publish where we please – including closed-access venues. This discordance not only affects our own scholarly practices but should also be acknowledged within librarians’ continuing efforts to encourage faculty to embrace open access.

So, you want make sure you publish your research in a “good” journal? Maybe your role includes advising others on how to select appropriate publication venues? It’s tricky navigating the complex and rapidly shifting terrain of scholarly publishing, where traditional hallmarks of quality such as Impact Factor no longer reign supreme. The rise of predatory journals makes the publishing environment even more challenging. This session explored strategies for evaluating the quality and relevance of academic journals, maximize the reach of one’s research and avoiding problematic publications.

The arrival of technology supporting peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing in scholarly communication has, until recently, had minimal impact on libraries. However, threats posed by pirate sites including Library Genesis Project (LibGen) and Sci-Hub are now impacting both library users and library licensing agreements with publishers. Publishers are nervous as they witness their proprietary content leaking out of paywalled systems—not just hundreds of thousands of articles, but millions. Accordingly, publishers are monitoring activities in licensed products very closely for any behavior that they deem suspicious. When a user’s activities cause a publisher to question whether materials are being pirated, the outcomes can vary. Consequences can range from relatively minor inconvenience for blocked users, who must find workarounds to access scholarly content—to the potential for major disruption of a centuries-old proprietary publishing system. This article uses a case study involving a student at Brock University to highlight significant challenges facing libraries and the rights of their users in the current environment of piracy-wary academic publishers.

Introduction: This exploratory study was intended to shed light on Canadian academics’ participation in, knowledge of and attitudes towards Open Access (OA) journal publishing. The primary aim of the study was to inform the authors’ schools’ educational and outreach efforts to faculty regarding OA publishing. The survey was conducted at two Canadian comprehensive universities: Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario) and Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) in 2014. Methods: A web-based survey was distributed to faculty at each university. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Limitations: Despite the excellent response rates, the results are not generalizable beyond these two institutions. Results: The Brock response rate was 38%; the Laurier response rate was 23% from full-time faculty and five percent from part-time faculty. Brock and Laurier faculty members share common characteristics in both their publishing practices and attitudes towards OA. Science/health science researchers were the most positive about OA journal publishing; arts and humanities and social sciences respondents were more mixed in their Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, vol. 11, no. 2 (2016) 2 perceptions; business participants were the least positive. Their concerns focused on OA journal quality and associated costs. Conclusion: While most survey respondents agreed that publicly available research is generally a good thing, this study has clearly identified obstacles that prevent faculty’s positive attitudes towards OA from translating into open publishing practices.