Today (March 17, 2025) is Green Open Access Day, a time to celebrate and promote the importance and benefits of green open access (OA). Green OA, also known as self-archiving, allows researchers to make a version of their article openly available through an institutional or disciplinary repository. This ensures that research is accessible to a global audience without paywall restrictions. In addition to fostering inclusivity and the democratization of knowledge, green OA supports timely, transparent, and reproducible research dissemination.
For UWindsor researchers, Leddy Library makes self-archiving easy through its institutional repository, Scholarship @ UWindsor. Our repository will migrate to a new platform in June 2025, joining a broader network of Canadian research libraries. Scholaris will provide a centralized platform where Canadian researchers can easily share, discover, and collaborate on scholarly work across institutions and disciplines. For more details and updates, please visit the Scholarship @ UWindsor Migration Project page.
The demand for green OA is expected to grow with proposed changes to the Tri-Agency Open Access (OA) Policy on Publications. A draft of the revised policy was recently released, and the updated version is expected to take effect on January 1, 2026, replacing the 2015 policy. The revised policy aims to ensure that all agency-funded, peer-reviewed research articles are immediately and freely available online to researchers, as well as readers in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. All Canadian researchers, regardless of funding status, are encouraged to follow these guidelines to promote the broad dissemination and open exchange of research. Researchers have until March 31, 2025, to review the proposed policy and provide feedback through the Tri-Agencies' online form.
Celebrate Green OA Day by promoting your research collections available through Scholarship @ UWindsor, or by submitting your research to the University of Windsor’s institutional repository. If you have any questions about depositing your work in Scholarship @ UWindsor and selecting the appropriate version for self-archiving, Leddy Librarians are available to assist. Contact us at scholarship@uwindsor.ca.
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