Concordia University’s academic community has passed a landmark Senate Resolution on Open Access that encourages all of its faculty and students to make their peer-reviewed research and creative output freely accessible via the internet. Concordia is the first major university in Canada where faculty have given their overwhelming support to a concerted effort to make the full results of their research universally available.

“Concordians have, once again, found a way to share their innovative findings and creativity with communities the world over”, says Judith Woodsworth, President and Vice-Chancellor of Concordia. “As befits its role as host of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences next month, our university is now leading the way on this year’s Congress theme: Connected Understanding/le savoir branché.”

Gerald Beasley, Concordia’s University Librarian, was instrumental in the campus-wide dialogue on open access that began more than a year ago. “I am delighted that Senate voted to support the recommendations of all four Faculty Councils and the Council of the School of Graduate Studies. There are only a handful of precedents in North America for the kind of leadership that Concordia faculty have demonstrated by their determination to make publicly-funded research available to all rather than just the minority able to afford the rapidly rising subscription costs of scholarly databases, books and journals.”

This past year, Concordia launched Spectrum, an open access digital repository that continues to grow beyond its initial 6,000 dissertations submitted at Concordia, and at its predecessors Sir George Williams University and Loyola College. The Senate Resolution encourages all of Concordia’s researchers to deposit their research and creative work in Spectrum.