Concordia University has a long history of supporting open access.

Concordia University is a founding member of the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI), a coalition of North American universities and colleges with faculty OA policies. COAPI shares OA implementation strategies and advocates for OA institutions. Concordia is also a member of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.

DORA

Concordia signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in 2024 (News Story). Through the growth of institutional and individual signatories, DORA is designed to improve how research is evaluated. DORA encourages rethinking the overreliance on journal impact factors, which may provide more space for recognizing the value of open scholarship, such as in the narrative CV.

Learn more about DORA and Concordia’s Pathways to Impact.

Senate Resolution

The Open Science Working Group authored the Senate Resolution on Open Scholarship at Concordia University, which was unanimously approved by Concordia University’s Senate on Friday, May 16, 2025. The revised resolution accounts for how the open scholarship has evolved over the past decades. To democratize access to knowledge and bring greater inclusivity and transparency to the forefront, open scholarship has grown to include a broader range of outputs, such as open access articles, open educational resources, open code and software, open methods and evaluation, open data, open labs, open notebooks, open technical work, creative works, research-creation, open products, open innovations, and citizen science.

The new 2025 Senate resolution updates the University's initial 2010 Senate Resolution on Open Access (English PDF | French PDF), which encouraged faculty and students to make their peer-reviewed research and creative output freely accessible by depositing it in Spectrum, Concordia's institutional repository, or another open access venue. This was one of the first such resolutions in Canada. 

Berlin Declaration

In 2011 Concordia University became a signatory to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities.

Ongoing Support

Concordia University Library supports OA scholarship and research dissemination in other ways including institutional memberships and supports for publishers and initiatives, including:

• EPrints;
• Pressbooks
• ORCID;
• arXiv;
• CRKN's Heritage Project;
• CRKN's Partnership in Open Access (POA)
• SCOAP3.

Consult the full list of institutional supports for OA publishing. In 2024, the Library iniatiated an Open Task Force to further its support of the open landscape.