Profile of CARL's support for OA

Heather Morrison, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL): Canadian Leader in Open Access, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, January 13, 2007.  Excerpt:

Synopsis.  Recently, the CARL/ABRC (Canadian Association of Research Libraries / Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada) decided to freely, and immediately, release their E-Lert / Cyberavis. This is good news; but, not too surprising, because CARL/ABRC is yet another of Canada's early leaders in the open access movement.

It was less than a month after the announcement of the world's first defining moment in open access, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, when CARL/ABRC issued a report endorsing the Initiative, and less than a year before CARL/ABRC held a conference to discuss the results of their own open access pilot, the CARL Institutional Repository project.

CARL/ABRC was among the first to endorse the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the organizations still have a close and ongoing relationship.
Current CARL/ABRC open access leadership is shown on the advocacy front, as with their recent response to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs, and implementation, in the ongoing (and growing) CARL Institutional Repositories Project, and the Allouette Canada Open Digitization Initiative.

Some of the principles of CARL/ABRC's Hamilton Principles of 1995, especially the right of all individuals to have access to all expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual activity, and the fundamental role of academic research libraries in facilitating and enhancing the process of scholarly communication, were, in my opinion, more than prescient for their time, as these principles have much to offer to libraries of today and tomorrow to guide the way to open access....