The Concordia University Senate has passed an open access policy. Concordia University has a "student body of almost 44,000 undergraduate, graduate and continuing education students from more than 150 countries, studying in over 500 programs."
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
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. . . .
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.
Here's the policy:
Whereas
Open access makes the results of publicly funded academic research and creative work accessible to everyone via the internet and succeeds by supplementing but not replacing peer-reviewed journals and other established publishing venues, and
whereas Concordia University wishes to take a leadership role in Canada and exemplify social responsibility by supporting the principles of open access and has recently launched Spectrum, an open access repository freely available to receive the refereed academic research output and creative work voluntarily deposited by Concordia faculty and others, with assistance from librarians and other library staff as required, thereby satisfying the requirements of a number of funding agencies in Canada and elsewhere without affecting the intellectual property rights, responsibilities and academic freedom of faculty members;
It was resolved that Senate recommends that Concordia University:
– from now on encourages all its faculty members to deposit an electronic copy of their refereed research output and creative work in Spectrum, along with nonexclusive permission to preserve and freely disseminate it; and
– furthermore, in the specific case of any scholarly article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, from now on requires all faculty members to deposit an electronic copy in Spectrum along with non-exclusive permission to preserve and freely disseminate it. This requirement is not binding in cases where publishers, co-authors or other rights holders disallow such a deposit. Faculty members may also, without prejudice, opt out of the requirement by notifying the University Librarian in writing that their work has appeared, or will appear in another Open Access format; or by citing other factors that currently discourage them from depositing their work in an Open Access repository
