Open Access Week: Concordia’s Spectrum serves up 3,005,850 downloads
Spectrum is Concordia’s web-based open access research repository. Since its inception in 2009, it has grown to accommodate more than 13,314 documents.
The vast amount of material includes peer-reviewed articles, book sections and conference presentations submitted by Concordia scholars, as well as graduate theses.
And it’s all freely available for download worldwide.
To mark International Open Access Week, we unearthed these 5 Spectrum facts.
5 fascinating facts about Spectrum
- Since Spectrum’s 2009 launch, more than 3,005,850 document-downloads have been made from the repository.
- The top 10 countries downloading from Spectrum are, in descending order: Germany, the United States, China, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, France, Japan, Australia and Malaysia.
- The most downloaded author in 2013-14 was marketing professor Michel Laroche from the John Molson School of Business. He's contributed to 17 academic papers on Spectrum. So far, they have been downloaded 8,665 times.
- The single most-downloaded item in 2013-14 is a journal article by Chitu Okoli, an associate professor in the Department of Supply Chain and Business Technology Management. “The Delphi Method as a Research Tool: An Example, Design Considerations and Applications” was published in the December, 2004 edition of Information and Management.
- Concordia's Faculty of Arts and Science has added the most number of documents to Spectrum since 2009: a total 4,925 and counting. In 2013-14, the faculty uploaded 269 articles and theses, followed closely by the Faculty of Engineering with 251.
How Spectrum became an open-access champion
Concordia is an established leader in the academic open-access movement.
It was the first major Canadian university to make the full results of its research universally available and to put forth a landmark Senate Resolution on Open Access.
The 2010 resolution commits the university to “take a leadership role in Canada and exemplify social responsibility by supporting the principles of Open Access,” and encourages Concordia faculty and researchers to deposit their work in Spectrum.
Concordia’s libraries provides much of the administrative, editorial and technical support for the research repository's day-to-day operations, including assistance in depositing faculty publications.
When faculty members add their work to Spectrum, the repository provides a permanent URL link to it, which they can add to their profiles on the university website.
Open access is important to Concordia, says scholarly communications librarian Geoffrey Little, because “it promotes an open environment in which research outcomes — which are often publically funded — are shared widely so as to have the most impact.”
Find out more about Spectrum, Concordia’s open access research repository.