Canada's three major federal research agencies released a revised open-access policy requiring that peer-reviewed articles from grants awarded after January 2027 become freely available upon publication with no embargo period.
The policy covers research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Since 2016, Ottawa has committed more than $41 billion through these agencies.
Researchers can meet the requirement by depositing work in institutional repositories or publishing in journals that do not charge authors. However, the policy permits researchers to use public research funds to pay article-processing charges without any caps or limits.
Article-processing charges, which publishers levy to make articles freely accessible, vary widely and can exceed US$12,850 for top-tier journals like Nature. Between 2019 and 2025, researchers spent as much as US$15.08 billion on these charges to 14 publishing houses globally. The majority of this money went to five major publishers: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.
Other funders have restricted such charges. The Gates Foundation no longer pays commercial publishing fees. UK Research and Innovation and the international Plan S initiative limit funding to fully open-access journals. The U.S. National Institutes of Health caps how much grant funding can be spent on article fees.
The policy also requires researchers to retain certain rights over accepted manuscripts and deposit publications immediately into Canadian institutional repositories. However, implementing these requirements places additional administrative burden on researchers, particularly early-career and contract faculty who must negotiate with commercial publishers. University libraries absorb costs for archiving and managing metadata without dedicated funding from the policy.
Compliance with the previous 2015 policy reached only 44 percent from 2015 to 2019 due to lack of consequences. The revised policy lacks adequate monitoring and enforcement, with the Tri-Agency indicating it will not formally evaluate universities' open-access strategies.