Public access to research generates new ideas, informs policy decisions and fuels innovation and technological development. Open access to knowledge helps address social issues, enhance democracy and reduce inequality.

These are key reasons why publicly funded research should be available to the public.

The federal government's 2024 budget shows that Canadian taxpayers have funded over $16 billion in research and development since 2016. Each year, millions of those research dollars flow from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

These publicly funded federal agencies each offer unique grants and programs covering different research disciplines. When they work in unison, such as when setting research guidelines and policies that apply across all three agencies like the one described in this article, they are collectively known as the Tri-Agency. This money is an investment is Canada's future, and researchers and their institutions rely on Tri-Agency funding to conduct and share their research.

In 2015, the Tri-Agency implemented its open access (OA) policy requiring that most published research articles funded by Tri-Agency grants should be openly available in some format, and free to anyone anywhere, with no sharing or distribution restrictions.

For Canadians and readers around the world, that means no subscription fees or paywalls. This mandate enshrined the principle that publicly funded research should be available to the public. It reached across disciplines by including research supported by all three funding bodies.

Following consultation with researchers, institutions, publishers, libraries, Indigenous advisers and others, the Tri-Agency released a draft revision of its open access policy in February 2025. This update explicitly mentions that Canadians at large are part of the research audience.

Key improvements include eliminating the 12-month embargo period that allowed publishers to delay open access, and requiring researchers to use open copyright licenses (like Creative Commons). Authors must also maintain copyright over their works, including secondary publishing rights. Together these provisions ensure that research can be accessed, shared and used.

The Tri-Agency plans to implement the new policy in January 2026, leaving some time for final revisions. This presents an opportunity to make the mandate even stronger.

Unfortunately, the revised policy repeats some mistakes from the past. Addressing just two key areas will improve accountability and transparency, and reinforce the commitment to making publicly funded research available to the public.

1. Meaningful monitoring and reporting: A weakness in the existing and revised policy is a lack of effective compliance measures. Research evidence shows that mandating open access reinforces compliance compared to just recommending that authors to make their research open. Many Canadian researchers are meeting this mandate, but overall the Tri-Agency has a significant open access compliance problem.

Even the Tri-Agency itself doesn't know whether authors are meeting the current mandate.

After a decade, the mandate doesn't seem to be very effective. And nothing in the proposed revisions empowers authors or institutions to track and report on the open access status of their publications, or demonstrate they've met their open access expectations.

Read more: Why we need open-source science innovation - not patents and paywalls

Instead of repeating past shortcomings, a commitment to reporting and monitoring at organizational and Tri-Agency levels would help. There's an opportunity here for collaboration.

The Tri-Agency could commit to monitoring open access outcomes, and researchers seeking national funding could commit to reporting on the openness of their research. This would improve adherence, allow the Tri-Agency to highlight the benefits of public research funding, give Canadian researchers some time in the spotlight and strengthen public trust in our institutions.

2. Reduce financial barriers and incentivize open access: Academic publishing is dominated by a small group of commercial scholarly publishers who profit by controlling access and distribution of research articles. These same publishers have successfully monetized open access by using article processing charges, or APCs.

Under this model, authors must pay an extra publication fee to the journal to make their article open access, and many researchers are using research funds to pay expensive fees instead of directing that money toward more research. Similar to compliance rates, the Tri-Agency doesn't know how much of their funding is being redirected to publishers as publication fees.

These fees benefit for-profit publishers but are a barrier to research sharing. This is not the first call to remove the fees, and Canadian researchers themselves question whether research funds should be used to pay these costs. Worldwide, increasing publication costs are straining research funds and increasing inequities around who gets to publish.

We have an opportunity to implement real change by requiring free open access in the updated mandate. With nearly 100 open research repositories registered in Canada, and over 13,000 fee-less journals registered in the Directory of Open Journals, paying to publish is unnecessary. The Tri-Agency could also limit the use of agency funding to pay these fees.

I am an academic librarian engaged in open publishing, and a researcher subject to the same funding mandate. In my professional opinion the policy updates prove that the Tri-Agency is committed to change.

Now is the time to make the open access mandate stronger, by improved monitoring and by directing researchers toward free open access publishing options.

The power to make these changes and put solutions in place all rests with the Tri-Agency. It's in their hands. The fact that this policy is being revised right now means it's the perfect time to explicitly support free and open access to research paid for by Canadians.

As the Tri-Agency weighs feedback from recent public consultations, let us hope that policy-makers, universities, libraries, publishers and individual researchers will come together to make free and open access the norm.