Canada’s major federal research agencies released a revised open-access policy requiring peer-reviewed articles from grants awarded after January 2027 to be freely accessible immediately, though the framework leaves publication fees uncapped, The Conversation reported.
Studies supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research fall under the scope of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on publications. Originally introduced in 2015, the updated framework aims to make publicly funded science universally available without paywalls.
Unrestricted Fees Risk Feeding Corporate Profits
While immediate open access scores a win for public science, the policy contains a glaring financial vulnerability by permitting researchers to use public grant money to pay commercial publication fees without any restrictions. These article-processing charges vary wildly, scaling up to US$12,850 for top-tier venues like Nature.
Without hard caps, public research budgets risk feeding corporate profit margins. Academic publishing operates as a heavily concentrated oligopoly dominated by the Big Five: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.
Global data illustrates the sheer scale of this revenue engine. Academics worldwide paid about US$1.06 billion in these charges between 2015 and 2018.
More recent figures show that between 2019 and 2025, researchers spent as much as US$15.08 billion on article-processing charges across 14 global publishing houses.
International Policy Divergence
Other major funding bodies abroad have already implemented strict cost controls. The Gates Foundation refuses to cover commercial publishing fees entirely.
Meanwhile, UK Research and Innovation and the international Plan S initiative restrict their funding strictly to fully open-access journals. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health enforces strict caps on how much grant money can go toward article fees.
Canada appears to be lagging behind these international peers. Since 2016, Ottawa has committed more than $41 billion through the Tri-Agency, yet the new policy omits spending limits on commercial processing fees.
Administrative Burden on Universities
The policy avoids direct confrontation with commercial publishers, shifting the administrative heavy lifting onto academic institutions and individual scholars instead. Researchers must negotiate rights retention directly with major publishers backed by massive legal teams.
This dynamic hits early-career, pre-tenure, and contract faculty the hardest. University libraries face new operational costs to manage metadata, verify copyright compliance, and archive digital files.
Yet the Tri-Agency framework provides no dedicated funding for university repositories. Libraries are left to absorb these labor-intensive preservation costs independently.
Policy Fails to Address Enforcement and Fee Caps
In March 2025, critics cautioned that the draft version of the policy repeated two historic mistakes: weak enforcement and uncapped fees. The final policy left both issues unaddressed.
Compliance under the previous 2015 framework sat at just 44 percent between 2015 and 2019. Although institutions must roll out open-access strategies within a two-year window under the updated mandates, the Tri-Agency has noted that those blueprints will not undergo formal review.
